“This is perhaps The Wizard of the Kremlin‘s most disturbing message: in Russia, dictatorship is not just by design, but built into the fabric of the Russian psyche.”

“A prince’s trust is not a privilege but a conviction.”

In all fairness, Olivier Assayas’s latest effort The Wizard of the Kremlin is little more than the dramatization of a couple of Wikipedia pages. But in the hands of the French helmer and his lead man Paul Dano, ironically playing a supporting character, albeit an important one, in the rise of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin to the position of Russian dictator, this epic account becomes an engrossing tale on the power of corruption and the corruption of power. A whirlwind tour, even at a 160-minute runtime, of Russian political play in the highest echelons of the Kremlin from the fall of the Soviet Union to the mid-2010s, the film overcomes swaths of exposition and a clunky framing device to illustrate the dog-eat-dog world of Putin’s inner circle through high production values and highly quotable dialogue, and puts Paul Dano and Jude Law firmly back into the conversation.

An American journalist, Rowland (Jeffrey Wright, in somewhat of a thankless role), takes a sabbatical to spend a year in Moscow researching an obscure Russian political writer. He gets a mysterious invite to a dacha just outside the city, somewhere in those endlessly stretching Russian birch woods. Suddenly he finds himself eye to eye with Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), the former advisor of Vladimir Putin. Baranov has chosen to bare his soul to Rowland, for reasons that will remain unclear until the end of the film. And so he starts an account of his own humble beginnings in Moscow’s wild 1990s, the period of Perestroika, to becoming arguably the second most powerful man in Russia. For the record, Baranov is a fictional character created by novelist Giuliano da Empoli, though heavily inspired by Vladislav Surkov, a powerful Russian politician once dubbed ‘a poet among wolves’. Baranov starts out as a theater director, but by making the right connections among future oligarchs he makes it to a reality TV producer and into the circle of Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), a powerful businessman who introduces Vadim to Putin, then the head of the FSB, the successor of the Soviets’ feared KGB.

Putin recognizes Baranov’s talents and takes him on as an advisor and spin doctor to Putin’s election campaign, an election that becomes a formality once Putin takes over when Boris Yeltsin resigns from his post before the end of his term in 1999. Baranov explains his theory of democracy versus power, with the former being on the horizontal axis and power on the vertical; Russians prefer the vertical, a strongman, he explains. Putin takes this to heart and quickly starts to push the nouveaux riches from his sphere of influence, starting with Dmitry Sidorov (Tom Sturridge), a friend-turned-oligarch who once stole Vadim’s girlfriend Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) away from him. This single female character of note, also a fabrication, will return to Baranov’s life at one point in order to somewhat humanize his character, but make no mistake: this soft-spoken man with a cherubic face is ruthless in the way he guides Putin through potential minefields like the sinking of the Kursk nuclear sub, the wars in Chechnya, and the Orange Revolution on Kyiv’s Maidan Square (although the film ends in 2019, it’s easy to draw a line from its events to Russia’s current aggression in Ukraine).

Playing the Russian puppeteer, Paul Dano shines in what is without doubt his best performance to date. Baranov rarely shows emotion, so all Dano has are words and their inflection, which he offers in soft tones that are not necessarily threatening but mercilessly piercing. In dealing with so much history, the dialogue being riddled with exposition, most glaringly in the framing device around Dano and Wright, comes with the territory, and it makes the scenes between the two actors the weakest. This device was already present in the novel, but it would have been better if it had been removed, because while Dano is as much in his element in performing Vadim Baranov in these scenes as he is in the dramatization of the events in the Kremlin, the clunkiness is hard to miss. But it doesn’t hamper Dano’s excellent performance, whose soft eyes belie the steely mind behind them.

Equally impressive is Jude Law as the Tzar himself, Vladimir Putin. Getting his mannerisms and gait down, Law becomes increasingly terrifying as he draws more power to him and creates that vertical axis Baranov spoke about. Baranov explains earlier in the film that in Russia, proximity to power is everything, and that power is measured in privileges instead of money. It is one of the contrasts he draws to the West, where arresting a politician is not frowned upon too much, but arresting a billionaire isn’t fathomable. Hyperbolic, for sure, but there is a kernel of truth in the wisdom Baranov spouts about his Western adversaries whom he intends to play like a fiddle. The emergence of the innocuously named Internet Research Agency, in reality a troll farm that aims to destabilize Western societies, is just one example of this. “No one is safe in Russia,” and that is true of even Baranov, but it is he himself who has created this monster based on the idea (which is not unsupported) that the Russian spirit is one that longs for a strong ‘father’ of the state; Stalin’s enduring popularity among parts of the Russian public is proof of that. This is perhaps The Wizard of the Kremlin‘s most disturbing message: in Russia, dictatorship is not just by design, but built into the fabric of the Russian psyche.