Review: 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' fictionalizes the voice in Putin's ear, guiding his rise to power

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Frenchman Olivier Assayas’ canvas is either highly personal (“Suspended Time”) or deliriously global (“Carlos”).He can be hard to pin down as a filmmaker, except when the material does the restraining for him, as the intermittently arresting but overplayed piece of political theater “The Wizard of the Kremlin” proves.Operating off the same-named novel by Giuliano da Empoli, about a behind-the-scenes manipulator named Vadim Baranov helping to orchestrate Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, Assayas and co-screenwriter-journalist Emmanuel Carrère have fashioned a whirlwind shadow biopic of 21st century tsardom that blends the real story (Jude Law is Putin) and an invented one (Paul Dano is Baranov) with all the wisdom-in-hindsight energy of an old-school epic dramatizing How Things Came to Be.The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

Movies If you want big popcorn fare from the best directors in the blockbuster game (Spielberg, Nolan, Ridley Scott), it’s here, along with a number of promising indie swings.That doesn’t apply to a scarily good Law, who makes the most of a curiously underwritten featured-player part.When given center stage, his Putin is commanding, reminding us of the real sinister power in the room.

But everyone else in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is mouthpiece first, character second.Post-Cold War Russia’s swerve away from clunky democracy is as fascinating a turn of events as geopolitics gets, but it’s been reduced to an extended lect...