Like Atonement, The Kite Runner is about an author who tries to work through childhood sins and find forgiveness among words on the page. The film, a story of friendship and family, guilt and redemption, is solid and competently made, but then those are words one always uses when a piece of art falls short of greatness.
The Kite Runner begins in 1979, just before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Despite glaring class differences, young Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada) are inseparable friends. They spend their days flying colorful kites high above the rooftops of Kabul, and reading books about exploits of tremendous courage. However, Amir’s wealthy businessman father, Baba (Homayon Ershadi), is concerned about his son. “There’s something missing in that boy,” he laments to his own dear friend, Rahim Kahn (Shaun Toub). Baba feels his son lacks the prerequisite elements necessary to fashion him into manhood — he is too soft, lacks moral stamina, and is unwilling to stand up for anything. The kindhearted Kahn, more father to Amir than the aloof Baba, assures him the boy will turn out just fine.
Tragically, Baba’s prophecies come to pass. Despite identifying with the valiant Steve McQueen in The Magnificent Seven, which he has seen half a dozen times at the local theater, Amir is paralyzed by cowardice, watching unobserved as neighborhood thugs rape and sodomize his best friend. Wracked with guilt, Amir inflicts further injury to his friend as a means to push the object of his shame farther away, ultimately going so far as to get Hassan fired from his father’s employ.
Twenty years pass and Amir is now a grown man (played by United 93’s Khalid Abdalla) living in San Francisco. A writer with a new wife (Atossa Leoni) and a brand new book, Amir receives a phone call from his old friend, Rahim Kahn who urges him to return to Afghanistan with the simple plea, “There is a way to be good again.” Initially reluctant, Amir returns to the land of his youth (with breathtaking Western China standing in for Afghanistan), a land decimated by the Soviet army and now blighted by the brutal, totalitarian Taliban regime. There he must confront the demons of his past, find the courage he lacked as a child, embark on a risky mission to rescue a young child, and make amends for the shame which has suffocated him every day of his life.
The Kite Runner is based on Khaled Hosseini’s runaway bestseller and one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory. The film is directed by Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction), but due to its time and setting, necessarily lacks Forster’s usual panache and visual flourish.
At times, The Kite Runner feels as if whole reels have gone missing. The screenplay streamlines the novel’s narrative, condensing such monumental events as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the very thing that precipitated the move to America in the first place) into mere seconds of screentime, making it feel rushed and oversimplified. More jarring are instances of over-the-top, Hollywood-inspired melodrama, specifically a violent confrontation between the adult Amir and his childhood nemesis, Assef. I say Hollywood inspired only because the film can hardly be blamed for a fault found first in the novel.
Indigenous newcomer Mahmidzada does a terrific job as Hassan (his face perfectly captures his personality), though both Ebrahimi and Abdalla fall short as Amir. It’s not that Amir’s actions ban us from any sort of emotional connection, but Forster has the two actors play him so blandly, like a man so consumed by guilt that he sleepwalks through life, feeling nothing, that it’s hard to get behind the very protagonist with whom we are meant to identify.
The Kite Runner has been plagued with controversy of late, as the young actors portraying the leads have been moved out of Afghanistan for their own protection after angry locals learned that the homosexual rape scene was included in the film. The children and their families claim that they were not informed of the full extent of the scene, and indeed, it is shot in such a way that the editing, more than the blocking, reveals what is taking place. Whatever the truth of the event, the scene is in no way graphic, and in a contextual admission that is galling to make, lacks a very real and devastating emotional kick because of it.
The Kite Runner manages to capture some of the angst of modern Islam. On the one hand, we witness the Taliban publicly stoning a woman at a soccer stadium, and on the other, Amir, who lost his faith about the same time he lost his best friend, discovers its majesty again alongside the redemption he so desperately needed. The film reveals both the beauty and the bloody excess. (Interestingly, the film alters the novel’s chronology, shifting the contemporary date of 2001 and its inevitable 9/11 commentary to a time just prior to the attacks).
The Kite Runner puts a human face on a catastrophe most of us now look right past on the nightly news. The film reveals a proud but bedeviled culture intimately, from the inside out, even as it also opens the same world up to us from soaring kites with omniscient perspectives.
If only the film could have soared like its kites.
© Copyright 2007 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.