A look behind the Kremlin's walls

  It's easy to see why director Olivier Assayas may have been drawn to Giuliano Da Empoli's novel about the machinations behind Vladimir Putin's rise to power in post-Soviet Russia. We seem to relish behind-the-scenes looks at powerful institutions, perhaps hoping that we'll enjoy the contradictory pleasures of savoring and condemning the rot we find.

  Employing a strong cast led by Paul Dano, as Vadim Baranov, a master manipulator who becomes a backstage force in Putin's career, Assayas presents a highlight reel of Russian history from the 1980s to the invasion of Crimea. 

    Assayas unifies the movie's various segments with a narration by Baranov, who meets at his country home with a visiting Yale professor (a wasted Jeffrey Wright) to whom he tells his story, a framing device that weighs the movie down.

   Shifting focus and locations, Assayas introduces various important characters in the story, notably Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), an oligarch who identifies Putin as a successor to the increasingly ineffectual and doddering Boris Yeltsin. Berezovski mistakenly thinks Putin can be controlled.

   It takes awhile for him to appear, but Jude Law's Putin turns out to be a powerful addition to the movie. Compact, brutal and cunning, Putin's forceful presence can be felt even when he's off screen.  

   Working from a screenplay by Emmanuel Carrere, Assayas finds youthful energy in the wild days just after the fall of the Soviet Union. At this point, Baranov is a young theater student who samples the libertine freedoms of the 80s and 90s. 

    Baranov's theatrical background proves critical to his advancement; he's assigned the role of creating the illusory reality around Putin. He becomes skilled in the use of TV and eventually the internet. He's a master manipulator who operates without conscience, a technician who wants to be part of the action.

    Looking back on Dano's performance as Baranov, it's understandable that he chose to play this schemer with a low-key whispery voice. Baranov isn't a man of conviction; he's a man of prowess. Still, Dano's choice can feel a bit undercooked, and the characters surrounding Baranov can be more interesting than he, a problem the movie can't always overcome. 

     Early on, Baranov is smitten by a young woman (Alicia Vikander) who will crop up throughout in relationships with various characters, including a flamboyant, budding oligarch (Tom Sturridge) who lures her away from Baranov.

     Some of the actors are playing real people; others -- including Dano -- portray fictionalized characters. Baranov reportedly is based on Vladislav Surkov, a former Putin confidant and advisor. I'm always a bit wary of movies that mix the real and the fictional, especially when dealing with people who are still alive.

    Many of the actors employ Russian accents; others (including Dano) don't, but Assayas deserves credit for creating the impression that we're watching Russian characters in a complex drama with moving  parts that collide and abrade, often in ways that create an intriguing picture of undisguised deceit and corruption.

    For all that, The Wizard can't quite live up to the magnitude of its subject. At 136 minutes, The Wizard of the Kremlin harbors a surfeit of betrayals and power moves, but the movie also comes across as a crowded, novelistic effort that's not without interest,  but too frequently gets lost in the weeds.

 

A satire tries to give the art world its due

Velvet Buzzsaw aims at an easy target -- the commodification of art -- but the movie's cast produces enjoyable results.

If you think that the Los Angeles art world is ripe for satire, director Dan Gilroy's Velvet Buzzsaw won't disappoint. It's not that Velvet Buzzsaw lands a mortal hit. How could it? It's based on an obvious conceit about the obscene invasion of major money into a corrupted art world. It may not be a thematic powerhouse, but Velvet Buzzsaw makes some dead-on observations. Better yet, its cast of characters -- some bordering on art-world caricatures -- proves consistently amusing.

Reunited with his Nightcrawler star Jake Gyllenhaal, Gilroy introduces flashes of horror into a story in which the characters are precisely and wickedly drawn. Gyllenhaal's Morf, for example, is an art critic who regards his taste as nothing less than definitive. He's also in tip-top shape, a devotee of Peloton and Pilates. Sporting bangs and glasses, Morf evidently is one of those critics who can make or break a career. He's bisexual and so taste-conscious that he feels no compunction about expressing his displeasure with at the color of the coffin at a gallerist's funeral.

Rhodora Haze (Renee Russo) runs a top-drawer Los Angeles gallery. Rhodora has a keen eye for money and an attitude of superiority that flirts with bitchery. Oh well, forget flirts. Russo, who also worked in Gilroy's Nightcrawler, takes her character all the way. It's a pleasure to watch her.

Zawe Ashton works for Rhodora who claims to be grooming her charge for better things. Toni Collette has a sharply funny turn as a museum curator turned art consultant. Rhodora's main competition arrives in the form of another dealer Tom Sturridge's Jon Dondon.

The movie pushes us into the art world with style and wit before introducing its plot. The story gathers steam when Ashton's Josephina discovers a dead body in her apartment building. She enters the apartment of the deceased and discovers a collection of paintings done by the dead man, an unknown artist named Vetril Dease. Some of Dease's portraits evoke terror and torment. All his paintings, even those with wholesome subjects, have an eerie aura.

Josephina shows Dease's work to Morf. He immediately confirms her sense that she's stumbled onto a trove of original and highly marketable work. Eyes light up because Dease evidently is the next big thing. Even better, he's dead: His body of work never will expand.

No one seems particularly shaken by the fact that Dease wanted all of his paintings destroyed. As the movie unfolds, we discover why. People start getting murdered in horror-movie fashion.

But the resolution is less important than the way that Gilroy uses the plot to bring the characters into money-grubbing conflict.

John Malkovich sounds an almost sane note in a small role as an art star whose reputation has begun to fade.

Gilroy's satirical eye extends to the various high-fashion art uniforms worn by a chic-conscious cast of characters: Trends rather than trenchancy dominate.

The pretensions of the art world make for an easy target and Gilroy's overall insight -- greed motivates the sale and purchase of art -- can't be called fresh. But he invents a movie full of characters that provide a fair measure of entertainment. I'd say that the cast members were having one hell of a good time, even if some of their characters are brutally (and often creatively) knocked off.

Mary Shelley: Life before Frankenstein

Elle Fanning does credible work as Mary Shelley, the 19th-century author of Frankenstein. But Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda) loses out by attempting to walk a fine line between a well-adorned period piece and an emotionally turbulent tale populated by Mary Shelley and two poetic geniuses. Shelley's life changed when she met Percy Bysshe Shelley (Douglas Booth). Still a teenager, Mary defied her father (Stephen Dillane) to begin a relationship with Shelley, who already had a wife and daughter. Predictably, Mary's views about fidelity came into conflict with the Romantic poet's open attitudes toward sex and free-style living. Shelley's advocacy of counter-cultural values can seem a bit forced, although a rumpled Booth does his best to convey the poet's live-for-the-moment enthusiasms. The movie moves toward a gathering at the home of Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge), another Romantic poet, as well as an insufferable cad who comes across as someone who'd get himself into deep trouble in the age of #MeToo. Aside from being insensitive to anyone else's feelings, Byron exploits Mary's gullible half-sister Claire (a spirited Bell Powley). Mary Shelley clearly delineates the prejudices faced by 19th-century women with aspirations beyond landing a husband. Al-Mansour's movie also serves to introduce Shelley to those who only know her work, many through big-screen adaptations. But Al-Monsour doesn't solve the major problem faced by those who make movies about writers: their work -- Frankenstein doesn't emerge until the movie's almost over -- usually surpasses their lives, even when lived with the kind of stress, tumult, and suffering that supposedly helped Shelley create her masterpiece.

A mournful World War I story

A young officer mixes with hardened vets in Journey's End.

As time passes, World War I seems to have lost its grip on the popular imagination. The ill-named "War to End All Wars" shouldn't be forgotten, which is one of the reasons Journey’s End -- a World War I drama based on a 1928 play by R.C. Sherriff -- makes a welcome contribution to cinema’s inexhaustible canon of films about the horrors of war.

Director Saul Dibb puts us in the midst of the trench warfare that defined World War I. Claustrophobic as life in the trenches and sometimes constricted by its theatrical origins, Journey’s End nonetheless arrives as a mournful depiction of loss, particularly among young soldiers who had little idea what the war would do to them.

The movie centers on Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), a young officer who arrives at the front asking to be assigned to the company of a former school chum Capt. Stanhope (Sam Claflin). A man he views as a mentor, Stanhope also is engaged to Raleigh's sister.

By the time Raleigh arrives in the trenches, Stanhope has left the reality of the home-front far behind. He has been shocked into cynicism about the nature of warfare. Naive and eager, Raleigh doesn’t receive the hoped-for welcome from a man who can’t seem to drink enough alcohol to quiet his sense of fear, anxiety, and hopelessness.

The year: 1918 and the British soldiers are playing a waiting game as the Germans prepare to launch a major spring offensive.

Stanhope wants little to do with the wide-eyed Raleigh, who’s taken under wing by Lieutenant Osborne (a terrific Paul Bettany), a former school teacher who doesn't seem to have been crushed by the mud, boredom, and apprehension of a war that required harrowing night patrols and in which men could be gunned down even before they could even leave their trenches. The other soldiers refer to Bettany's character as "Uncle."

Journey’s End won’t unseat Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory as one of the great World War I films, but the performances are strong and, the movie proves sorrowful and moving, a reminder that many of the men who fight are destined to become bodies strewn across ravaged landscapes that hardly seem worth the trouble.

Living with that knowledge takes its toll on men of Company C and — as it should — on us.

Sheriff's play, by the way, was adapted for the screen in 1930 by director James Whale (Frankenstein), but the story is worth repeating and Dibbs does it well.

Another run at Thomas Hardy

Carey Mulligan holds the center of Far From the Madding Crowd.

Filmmakers haven't always had the best of luck with British novelist Thomas Hardy, so it's hardly surprising that director Thomas Vinterberg's big-screen adaptation of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd is a curiously mixed affair.

In its early going, Winterberg's movie plays like a CliffsNotes-inspired cascade of hurried plot developments.

A sampler:
-- We meet Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a young woman who fancies herself as radically independent. In short order, Bathsheba inherits a farm and an estate-like home in the fictitious rural area of Wessex that Hardy tended to favor.

-- An aspiring farmer (Matthias Schoenaerts) meets Bathsheba, and, within what seems like seconds, proposes to her. Schoenaerts, who hails from Belgium, makes the interchange believable, a sincere expression from a socially awkward man.

Of course, Bathsheba turns him down.

-- Thanks to a poorly trained sheep dog, Schoenaerts' Gabriel Oak loses his flock in a harrowing sequence in which his sheep are driven by the dog over a cliff. The loss causes Gabriel's farm to fail. Bereft of land, he sets out to find a new life.

-- After helping extinguish a fire on an estate he happens to be passing, Gabriel learns that he has stumbled upon Bathsheba's newly inherited property.

She hires him to work as the place's shepherd in residence. Metaphorically, he's always trying to put out the fires in her life.

You get the idea: Vinterberg, who began his career making Dogma films (The Celebration), and who, in 2012, scored with the disturbing The Hunt, advances the plot while offering what amount to quickly drawn character sketches.

The approach might have worked had Vinterberg's otherwise naturalistic images not been interrupted by the arrival of plot twists that seem hopelessly melodramatic. Hardy intended those same twists as evidence of the ways in which chance -- indifferent to human aspiration -- could alter and even ruin lives. Here, they're awkward stand-outs.

The rest of the story concerns a series of developments in which Bathsheba debates the merits of three suitors: Gabriel, whose love and loyalty never wavers; the tediously tormented William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), owner of the farm adjoining Bathsheba's estate; and the dashing Sgt. Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), a military man and obvious cad.

In one of the novel's most discussed scenes, Troy cuts through Bathsheba's resistance with a deft display of swordsmanship that arouses her desire. The movie follows suit, and Bathsheba -- heretofore governed by common sense -- falls prey to passion.

Marriage always seemed superfluous to Bathsheba, who needed no man to support her. Troy upsets the apple cart by turning her on.

Bathsheba marries Troy only to discover that she's not his one true love. Troy believes that the real love of his life (Juno Temple) humiliated him by leaving him waiting at the altar. He was wrong. In dithering haste, his fiancee showed up at the wrong church.

Mulligan ably conveys Bathsheba's intelligence, determination and wit, and there's nothing particularly wrong the rest of the performances, either.

But David Nicholls' screenplay either dawdles or moves to quickly, and although the movie flirts with being exceptional, it never quite fuses Hardy's themes into a heartbreakingly felt drama.

In a 1967 version, director John Schlesinger took two hours and 48 minutes to tell Hardy's story; perhaps it's a sign of progress that Vinterberg's version comes in just under two hours.