Oliver Stone's New Mini-series, on Putin

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The most telling moment in The Putin Interviews, director Oliver Stone’s four-hour conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, recorded over the course of nearly two years, comes late in the second hour.

Stone is trying to get Putin to say whether he does or doesn’t like then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Putin demurs entirely, but offers up a theory of how power functions.

Should Sanders become president, Putin says, he would suddenly realize the vast weight of the American bureaucracy that existed underneath him. He might make some changes to the US on a domestic level, but he would ultimately be unable to change that much — the person at the head of the state matters less than the centuries of power the state has accumulated and will protect at all costs. People aren’t responsible for what happens; the vast structures surrounding them are. Look at Barack Obama, Putin suggests. He sincerely wanted to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, and did he? No. You can’t fight the state.

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Oliver Stone is not a great interviewer, and that ultimately compromises this film

The knock against The Putin Interviews is that it’s a bit of hagiography on the part of Stone, who’s the kind of reflexive old lefty who sees the US as the root of almost all of the world’s ills and, therefore, anyone who opposes the US even mildly as a necessary evil to push back against the American-imposed darkness.

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