Paul Dano plays Vadim Baranov in The Wizard of the Kremlin
paul dano plays Vadim Baranov in The Wizard of the Kremlin, Olivier Assayas’s two-and-a-half hour film adaptation that arrived in cinemas last month. The casting puts a fictional Kremlin operator at the center of a story built around Russian power from the roaring 90s through the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Paul Dano takes the role of Baranov, the title’s fictional “Wizard,” a whizkid theatre and TV executive tasked with creating and curating a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin. That setup gives the film its businesslike shape: not a biography, but a portrait of the machinery around succession, with Jude Law as Vladimir Putin and Will Keen as Boris Berezovsky in supporting roles.
Olivier Assayas and Emmanuel Carrère
Olivier Assayas directed and co-wrote the film with Emmanuel Carrère, who also makes a brief cameo as a French intellectual. The script keeps the frame tight: an American academic played by Jeffrey Wright arrives in Moscow for a sabbatical of literary research, is picked up in a black Mercedes, and driven to a remote wooded dacha.
From there, Baranov tells his life story as the architect and facilitator of Putinism. The structure turns the film into a story within a story, which is a cleaner fit for political fiction than a straight-historical drama would have been, especially with a central character modeled on spin doctor Vladislav Surkov.
Roaring 90s to 2014
The film covers Russian politics from the roaring 90s through 2014, and it does so through Baranov’s version of events rather than a neutral survey. “What follows is a tick-tock of the epochal events of Russian politics from the roaring 90s through to the annexation of Crimea in 2014,” as the film’s own description puts it.
That long span gives Assayas room to move from post-Soviet uncertainty to the hardening of Putin-era power, with Baranov describing the system from the inside. “In Russia, things generally go quite well,” the American narrator says. “But when they go bad, they go really bad.”
Jude Law as Putin
Jude Law’s turn as Vladimir Putin and Will Keen’s casting as Boris Berezovsky place familiar names inside a film that treats succession, influence, and loyalty as the real stakes. Baranov says, “I know that Russia has always been forged this way – with an axe.”
For viewers, the practical value is simple: this is not a loose inspiration piece. It is a film version of Giuliano da Empoli’s 2022 novel that arrived in cinemas last month, and it leans on casting to sell a political history lesson that runs from the 1990s to Crimea in 2014.
