43/100
"I'm tired, Ksenia.""What of? Using your black magic in the service of power?"
Just painfully overstated, which is a neat trick given that Paul Dano has elected to deliver every one of his lines with the soft, soothing timbre of a hypnotist on Xanax. It's an odd paradox, actually: Baranov seems largely opaque throughout even as he keeps helpfully speaking the tale's subtext in dialogue: "I cannot bear the writer's failure to affect reality. I want to be part of my times, not just a witness." Does he succeed, though? Everyone talks about Baranov like he's Iago but to me he looks much more Cassio-toned, reactive rather than manipulative. Which is a problem because Jude Law plays Putin as a sullen, vacuous zero—accurate, perhaps, but not conducive to cinematic dynamism. It's the lump leading the lump, except you're never sure which lump is leading. (Thank christ for Will Keen, who enlivens every scene he's in and makes Berezovsky's fate improbably poignant.) Never would've pegged The Wiz as Assayas' work had I gone in blind, excepting maybe the hilarious moment when a 2000 trip to New York City gets needle-dropped with "21st Century Schizoid Man" (and even that's been kinda undercut by Kanye, would've had more cachet 20 years ago). Doesn't help that I virtually never get excited about this sort of historical autopsy, even when it's been quasi-fictionalized—Assayas (and co-screenwriter Emmanuel Carrère, who previously wrote Limonov, and Limonov does briefly show up here albeit not played by Ben Whishaw) may have accurately replicated early-post-Soviet Russia, but they never remotely got me interested in Baranov or his ostensible machinations, and that's nearly fatal. Bonus demerits (?) for the hoary framing device that has the whole story being told to Jeffrey Wright's American journalist. I bumped this sucker from my TIFF schedule last year because just about everyone said it kinda stank, and I'm afraid just about everyone was right.