The Wizard of the Kremlin (15, 152mins)
Rating:
Verdict: Absorbing political drama
Glenrothan
Rating:
Verdict: A porridge of cliches
Jude Law wasn't always an obvious choice to play bellicose, blood-soaked tyrants. But he made a convincing Henry VIII in the 2023 drama Firebrand and now, in the absorbing political thriller The Wizard Of The Kremlin, he stars as Vladimir Putin, less gouty than Henry, and less prone to executing wives, but no less monstrous.
Adapted by the French director Olivier Assayas from a novel of the same name, The Wizard Of The Kremlin is a riveting account of how political power evolved in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how it all ended up in the hands of a former KGB agent from St Petersburg.
The story is told from the perspective of a lightly fictionalised character called Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), who is said to be based on Putin's real-life spin-doctor Vladislav Surkov.
We meet Baranov through the useful if hackneyed device of a visiting US journalist, played by Jeffrey Wright.
Baranov invites the American to visit his handsome dacha, where the conversation turns to his life and career, shown in a series of extended flashbacks.
In 2020, incidentally, before Putin brought international pariah status on his country by invading Ukraine, I was privileged to serve on the jury of the Moscow Film Festival.
I was given an interpreter, a delightful fellow in his thirties who told me that much as he and his friends had exulted in the end of Communism, it had dismayed his parents' generation, whose cast-iron social, cultural and political certainties went up in smoke practically overnight.
The Wizard Of The Kremlin makes that same observation. Baranov explains that his father, who ran a Soviet cultural institute, knew his days were numbered when he watched Mikhail Gorbachev being handed a glass of milk during a live address on television.
Milk, not vodka. It was a metaphor, as his father saw it, for the de-Russification of Russia.
But for Baranov, a new Russia means new opportunities. He becomes a theatre director, then a television producer.
At a decadent party, he is beguiled by a bright and beautiful singer, played by Alicia Vikander.
They are soon lovers, until she is lured away by his charismatic friend Dmitry (Tom Sturridge), who knows how to deal with a consignment of brandy that won't sell for $50 a bottle; he jacks the price up to $500 a bottle and there's a stampede.
That's how the oligarchs become rich: through greed, folly and exhibitionism. But what really counts in Russia, unlike the West, is not money but 'proximity to power'.
Baranov is befriended by another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), who takes him to meet an ex-KGB man, now an up-and-coming politician. 'He's a modest guy, you'll like him,' he says.
It's our introduction to Putin, nicely played by Law, with his South London vowels intact.
The President, Boris Yeltsin, is ailing, so Berezovsky and Baranov persuade Putin to muscle his own way into the Kremlin. 'He's no rocket scientist but for now he'll do just fine,' notes Berezovsky of Putin, a misjudgement that's not just regrettable but fatal.
In 2013, the exiled Berezovsky is found dead at his home near Ascot. An open verdict is recorded.
As his power intensifies, Putin becomes known as the Tsar and Baranov as the 'New Rasputin', wielding the same sort of influence as the old Rasputin.
We are shown how, with the softly spoken Baranov at his side, Putin's global view is coloured by what he sees as post-Soviet 'humiliation'.
Returning from a G20 summit, he rages that he was treated as if he was the leader of some 'insignificant' country like Finland.
Smartly, Assayas presents all this not as a blend of recent history and informed supposition, but as a lively thriller. It makes sense to remember that. After all, none of us should be getting our geopolitical education from the movies.
But if The Wizard Of The Kremlin doesn't leave you with a clearer insight into why Putin ordered his tanks into Ukraine in 2022, it hasn't done its job.
The job of Glenrothan, the directing debut of the mighty Brian Cox, is to entertain and I suppose tug gently at the heartstrings, especially of anyone who feels sentimental about Scotland.
Alas, it's little more than a porridge of cliches, in which pretty much every strained attempt at heathery charm and highland whimsy lands as heavily as a tossed caber.
Cox plays Sandy Nairn, proprietor of a centuries-old family distillery, whose estranged brother Donal (Alan Cumming) returns to the auld country after decades in Chicago, where he runs a blues club with his daughter (Alexandra Shipp).
David Ashton's limp screenplay attempts to weave together the company's uncertain future and the fractured relationship between the brothers, with clunky flashbacks to their boyhood and Shirley Henderson as the passionate distillery manager who—as evidenced by 'you're a right eejit, Donal Nairn'—like everyone for miles around thinks Donal a right eejit...
Cox and Henderson do their substantial best with the lacklustre material, but Cumming forgets to act his emotions, opting to semaphore them instead. His woefully hammy performance sums up the entire picture.