Even when applied with the best of intentions, labels can be confusing. At the start of Olivier Assayas’s “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” a title card declares that, though the film is adapted from a novel of the same name, by Giuliano da Empoli, and is based on historical events, “it remains an original work of fiction with artistic intent. The characters, as well as their statements and opinions, are fictional.” When the action begins, the point seems clear enough: a fictitious Yale professor named Lawrence Rowland (Jeffrey Wright) reminisces about a 2019 visit to Russia to the country estate of one Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), a former political strategist then living in luxurious isolation with his young daughter. Lawrence had written an article about Vadim, and Vadim, who respects Lawrence as a scholar, now wants to tell him his life story. So far so fictional. Vadim begins by recounting his youth as the privileged son of a Soviet-era official who was cast aside under the liberalizing Gorbachev regime; the reversal of fortune roused the young Vadim to make the most of his life. As Vadim speaks, events unfold onscreen in flashbacks: after a stint of odd jobs like selling foreign electronic goods, he became a theatre director and frequented Moscow’s hipster scene. He began a relationship with a rock singer and punk provocateur named Ksenia (Alicia Vikander) who then left him for a rich young businessman (Tom Sturridge). Vadim traded his artistic calling for a flashy job in a privatized TV station and was then tapped for a political consultancy by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen)—halt!

Anyone who’s been reading the news in the past few decades knows that Berezovsky is no fictional character but a real-life Russian oligarch who fell out with Vladimir Putin and then was found dead, in Berkshire, in 2013, ostensibly from suicide. (A coroner’s inquest was inconclusive.) The movie, which Assayas co-wrote with Emmanuel Carrère, tells the story of how Berezovsky recruited Vadim as a behind-the-scenes fixer to launch Putin (Jude Law) into politics as the designated successor of the older and ailing Boris Yeltsin (George Sogis). Once in office, Putin installed Vadim as an adviser to help consolidate his administration into an autocracy responsible for the suppression of civil liberties, for wars in Chechnya and Ukraine, and for a campaign of disinformation and interference in Western democracies. The movie is filled with other real-life figures, including Garry Kasparov (Dmitryi Turchaninov) and Eduard Limonov (Magne-Håvard Brekke), Igor Sechin (Andrei Zayats) and Yevgeny Prigozhin (Andris Keišs). As for Vadim, he’s based on the real-life Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov. Assayas makes a point of foregrounding the fictionalization of his characters. Paradoxically, though, the freedom granted by that premise is used, in the movie, not to amplify the historical record but to distract from it.

The thematic core of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the shifting connection between appearances and realities, between what’s to be done and how it’s spun. When Putin plots war against Chechnya, Vadim warns him off the conflict as a quagmire and a potential disaster, but Putin worries neither about the outcome nor about the impression it will leave: he’s planning a campaign of ruthless brutality and has no intention of waging “a humane war, like the Americans do.” Above all, Putin favors big shows of Russian dignity and power. Vadim learns from this mentality: when Russia unleashes internet interference against Western democracies, under a program led by Prigozhin, Vadim assures him of the benefit of doing so openly and not hiding Russia’s traces: “Anything that makes you seem strong actually increases that strength.”

Despite such philosophizing, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” can only superficially be called a movie of ideas; it’s a movie of strategies rather than of ideologies, of how power is used rather than why. Assayas takes a cynical and clichéd view regarding temptation and corruption, worldly rewards of security and pleasure, even ego and pride, while having nothing to say about the transformations envisioned or the values embodied in the exercise of political authority. In a way, this void is built into the movie’s very setup: nearly the entire film is an illustration of Vadim’s narration to Lawrence, his self-portrayal to a researcher who will in turn convey it to the world. The story takes Vadim at his word. Just as Adolf Eichmann and Albert Speer portrayed themselves not as true believers but as mere functionaries, so Vadim presents himself to Lawrence as a master of method, not of principle. What’s more, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” does the same for the character of Putin as described by Vadim. It’s hard to imagine Assayas bothering to make a two-and-a-quarter-hour feature just to show engineers of atrocities concealing their motives. Then again, the title card doesn’t promise anything more, or better: if fictionalization is the point, then Assayas should have gone all the way and flaunted the movie’s inventions.

While watching “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” I found myself thinking wistfully of James N. Kienitz Wilkins’s recently released film “The Misconceived,” which he made by means of motion-capture technology and animated with video-game software, yielding a cast of realistic-looking people except for one, a young man who’s a cartoon character and reminds me of a Keebler elf. There’s unintentional comedy in the earnest impersonations that Assayas’s movie relies on, and it would have been improved by a similarly overt embrace of its absurdities. If Assayas had Wilkins’s imagination he might have forthrightly distinguished historical characters from made-up ones, rendering the titular wizard in overtly artificial form. As is, Assayas’s ambiguous fictionalization brings to mind Ali Abbasi’s 2024 film “The Apprentice,” a bio-pic of Donald Trump that depoliticized the character and made his moral failings strictly personal. What both movies miss are extremes of authentic political critique—or of blatant mockery.

One of the prime themes of “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is the relative ease with which the public can be manipulated. There’s little gap, the movie suggests, between Vadim’s youthful ambitions in the theatre and his later maneuvers in statecraft (which he considers merely “a game” but also “the only game worth playing”). Yet a truly political movie about the wizard and the beneficiary of his wizardry would have had to break the frame of Vadim’s calculated confession to Lawrence, getting outside the bubble of executive power to the people whom it acts upon. Assayas portrays the Russian populace as merely manipulated, as if voters were blank slates for effective propaganda rather than people with moral compasses, capacities for judgment and humanity, ideas and opinions that demagogues recognize and stoke.

The movie only hints at the underlying social tendencies that a populist exploits. Vadim theorizes that there are two dimensions to society, the “horizontal” of daily life and the “vertical” of authority; the freed-up Russia of the post-Soviet era offers the former but not the latter, he contends, and Putin’s candidacy can succeed by providing the missing sense of top-down order. Once Putin does take power, he schemes to make use of the same “fury” that, he asserts, made Russians in fact love Stalin’s cruelty. There’s not a word about ideology, about political principles, about what sort of society the new regime is meant to deliver. The only doctrine is delivered by Berezovsky, who, in posh but fretful exile in the south of France, complains to Vadim about what Putin has done: “We managed to build a free country . . . for the first time in Russian history, and you have wrecked all that in just a few years. You turned Russia back into what it always was: a prison the size of a country, just like in the Soviet times.” The movie thus offers a complaint about the end results of Putinism, not about the ideas—the emotions, the enthusiasms, the resentments, the hatreds—that brought it about. As such, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is a movie of political passivity, delivering blandly detached observations to be rued from the comfort of a seat in a theatre.

Assayas offers anecdotes, a feuilleton of tyranny in which the foibles of the mighty and the ruthless reveal the sentimental side of cruelty, the amusement value of ugly deeds, and the polite side of monstrous ideas. Instead of looking behind the scenes at cloistered men of power saying the quiet part out loud, Assayas’s glossily refined vision never shows them voicing their ideas at all. That failure is as much a problem of form as of substance, because to break out of the apolitical bubble of personalities is also to break out of the iridescent bubble of elegant narrative. Assayas is, above all, an urbane filmmaker, with no room for discourse so crude or interruption so abrupt as to let the winds of history waft through his film unperfumed. As ever, politics and morality alike are at the heart of cinematic form. Assayas’s aesthetic is too genteel to even imagine the specifics of loathsome doctrines. The movie fails politically to make clear what democracy is up against, and it fails artistically to imagine the unimaginable and give voice to the unspeakable. ♦