The Putin Interviews

Stone humanizes the boogeyman of the 2016 U.S. election in this fascinating, rambling, and sporadically invaluable exercise. Best not come looking for balance or journalism, though.

The Putin Interviews is a destabilizing documentary that challenges Americans’ narratives about ourselves and asks the viewer to engage in a conversation with a slippery subject. It’s riveting in how dangerous and intimate it feels, leveraging its multiple camera-angles and hand-held shots to make the viewer feel as if they, too, are in the room with Vladimir Putin.

The conversations are conducted via a Russian translator, and you have to be in the mood to read a lot of subtitles to engage with Putin and Stone’s policy discussions, but that small effort is well worth it. There are light moments here and there.

In the absence of startling revelations, what’s fascinating about this elaborate production is the theater of it all. Also, the degrees of arrogance on display. And the unspoken motives.

That moment [Comey's Senate hearing] and many others made for far more riveting cinema than the alternately static and stagy visual and narrative design of The Putin Interviews, which consists mostly of talking-head shots of Stone lobbing softballs and Putin dutifully, dispassionately hitting them back.

The special is solicitous, even obsequious, but sometimes revealing anyway.

Stone not only fails to challenge Putin, but essentially cedes him the floor, allowing the cunning ex-KGB operative to spin more than the president’s toupee in a tornado. ... The Putin Interviews offer, first and foremost, a staggering display of mendacity on the part of both interviewer and interviewee.