Editor’s note: This is the second installment in our coverage of “Vladimir.” Last week we reviewed Julia May Jones’ 2022 novel. Read that review here.

“Vladimir,” Netflix’s adaptation of Julia May Jones’ 2022 novel, opens with a scene of a rustic cabin.

Immediately, we are confronted by Rachel Weisz, dressed in a loose white nightgown and curled up in a tartan blanket, writing in her journal.

With a faux Midwestern-sounding accent, she starts to speak to the screen and says, “It has recently come to my attention that I may never have power over another human being again. My students who once fell over themselves to impress me now consider my teachings out of touch.”

She gets up and puts a large book on the bookshelf, perhaps a metaphor for her own situation of being placed back on the shelf.

Weisz, known simply as “the narrator,” continues, “My daughter, who used to worship me, now finds my entire personhood rather useless. And now, while it may be possible that a man may make a concession for me, it may not be the cause of a spontaneous erection—ever again.”  

“As an older woman, truly, who is more embarrassing, I would have lost the ability to captivate,” she continues.

The camera pans to a clearly unconscious, bearded Leo Woodall/Vladimir in the frame, tied up, wearing a tan cardigan and a tight pair of dark blue bikini briefs. 

The narrator leaves the cabin and lights a cigarette. “I find this very sad, don’t you?” she asks us. 

Inside, Vladimir screams, “What the fuck, what the fuck,” and so begins what is said to be a dark comedy about aging.

A dark comedy that isn’t very funny

The narrator waves smoke away and says sorry before a flash of the title appears, revealing a painting of a naked white male body, superimposed with the title “Vladimir,” only to be cut into pieces, objectifying every part of him, explicitly laying out the post-#MeToo politics of the series.

The series follows a bougie/innocent Weisz shopping in her local upmarket supermarket, preparing a salad for the upcoming faculty retreat—her 30^th.

This jars with her gorgeous mane of full dark hair, flawless, gleaming complexion and svelte body, but she came to college “in utero, so” the years—like the calories beautifully presented—apparently don’t count! 

Rather than see Vladimir on campus, he appears in the supermarket aisle dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt and immediately beams at her, checking her out. So much for not being able to get a man’s attention!

In the next scene, she arrives at the faculty retreat held within a dilapidated mansion.

Once inside, and in a clear departure from the novel’s plot, our narrator is immediately confronted by her faculty peers (excluding newbie Vladimir), who reveal that it is her husband who has been accused in the brewing campus sex scandal.

They grill her about what she knew and when she knew it regarding his affairs with numerous young female students. She says she was vaguely aware of them happening but that it was all consensual and “it was a different time”—a line repeated ad nauseam through the series.

Where the series diverges from the novel

She blithely tells us, “When I was in college, I wanted to fuck all my professors, old, young, male, female, but I was too timid, as George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘A firm ass is wasted on the young.’”

The narrator of the novel would never have said this because her experiences of having such sex as a younger woman were much more complicated, humiliating and painful.

What is most remarkable is not only how much better an American accent Woodall pulls off, but also how the two do not look dissimilar in age.

When his impossibly-thin-after-giving-birth wife Cynthia (Jessica Henwick) comes into the next scene, she looks like the youngest of them all by far.

When she is introduced, Vladimir just happens to adjust her errant black bra strap.

In the novel, she complains to the narrator that she is having trouble coercing her husband into sex.

The liberal use of the word “fucking,” which is not used in the novel, is an irritating feature from the get-go here as an adolescent signifier of apparent coolness, as is drinking and smoking.

Speaking of the F-word, there is plenty of it happening in relentless intercut fantasy scenes of the narrator and Vladimir doing just that.

So much so that it becomes a major turn-off.

One of the only times the series directly quotes the book is when the narrator says in a monologue:

“At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were. … Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. I want to let them know that when they’re sad, it’s probably not because of the sex they had and more because they spend too much time on the internet, wondering what people think of them.”

The on-screen narrator carefully omits the parts in the book where the character says she wants “to throw them a Slut Walk” and that says “now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place.”

To that end, she brazenly tells us (not Vladimir in confidence) that she and her husband have always had what today’s kids would call an “open marriage” without “all the dreadful communication.”

What is striking is that her husband, John (John Slattery), looks comparatively ancient, playing 63 to her 58.

Meaning that even a decade ago it would have been hard to imagine him being sexually appealing to an 18- to 22-year-old female student.

Sex, power and campus politics

Undeterred, he immediately appears to grab his wife’s tits as they discuss the injustice of him not technically being done for sexual misconduct because, in that throwback era, no such line existed.

She, as the wife, as women have done since the 1960s when she was “coming of age,” is simply getting on with it and ignoring what is happening.

You could call the series anti-feminist, but there is something even more sinister about it.

The students are all vaguely cast as women of color who are under the narrator’s spell.

When trying to support her, they tell her that she doesn’t have to “do the whole support wife thing,” to which she replies with thinly veiled contempt.

They also tell her they “think she is this hot, brilliant lady” who for those reasons has options and “doesn’t have to stand by her man.”

The narrator’s solution is to hate the haters, but not the game, as emphasized again and again by the appearance of a menagerie of pearl-clutching middle-aged white female liberals.

She must weave through them in order to sexually harass and then assault her own hot younger man.

Throughout the series, she immerses herself in campus political scheming, often in league with her husband, to shield him from legal and financial fallout.

In a surprising twist, she also becomes implicated in an overlapping case of abuse of power against one of her husband’s female student conquests, marking a major departure from the novel’s source material.

A sharper, darker interpretation

The narrator, now called “M,” comes off as a small-town Maleficent.

There are almost no laughs to be found here, in a series that veers wildly from the ordered events of the novel.

It races past its moral ambiguities to poke relentlessly at the snowflake prudery of Gen Z and the hypocritical sexual and professional politics of “the ivory tower.”

We are left with a scheming, sexed-up, sour-faced Weisz as the narrator, “unreliably” shepherding us through it all.

“Vladimir” novelist Julia May Jones is a writer and playwright based in Brooklyn, N.Y. She has taught theater at Skidmore College and New York University. “Vladimir” was her debut novel, and the Netflix adaptation was her first screenwriting credit.  

About the writer

Stephanie Polsky is a writer and academic based in New York and London, which explains her keen interest in the accents and atmosphere of the novel and the series, dear reader.