The Kite Runner
No literature was harmed in the making of "The Kite Runner," because, to be brutally frank, the beloved best-selling novel on which the movie is based doesn't qualify. The story of an Afghan émigré coming to terms with the sins of his childhood, Khaled Hosseini's book is a gripping fictional memory play that devolves into a human rights potboiler, with enough melodrama, coincidence, and guilt to make D.W. Griffith blush and Oprah swoon.
That's all right - the movies run on melodrama and they always have. Even at its most tortuously plotted, the book has the sentimental sweep of cinema; it opens up like a film as you read it. An actual big-screen adaptation seems a little redundant.
But here it is anyway, scripted by David Benioff ("Troy") and handsomely directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball," "Finding Neverland"), whose way with a narrative is more skilled than Hosseini's but just as earnest. "Kite Runner" the movie is an honorable, middlebrow affair - a solid double - that replicates the strengths and shamelessness of the book. The first half is an incisive portrait of a Kabul boyhood, the second a spiraling series of convenient events.
Perhaps the nerviest aspect, at least from the multiplex perspective, is that it asks mainstream American audiences to attend to a tale lacking Hollywood stars and English-language dialogue, one that takes place in a country known to many only from misunderstood headlines. Zekiria Ebrahimi plays the central character, Amir, as a young boy, growing up rich and risk-averse while his best friend, Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the family servant, takes all the chances. Ethnic and class divisions are alluded to, but this is mostly a uni versal tale of youth - an Afghan "To Kill a Mockingbird."
Like that classic, "Kite Runner" has an all-knowing father figure: Homayoun Ershadi as Amir's Baba, gruff and Westernized, spitting contempt at the Islamic priests. It also has a combination magic child/sacred martyr in Hassan, who takes on a heavy load of abuse, especially after the citywide kite-flying competition of the title.
Forster films this with soaring digital camerawork that follows the paths of the kites as they battle aloft: The sequence begins in the sky and ends in a squalid back alley with boyhood sickeningly coming to an end. The delicate play of betrayal, guilt, and projection is dealt with more clumsily than in the book - a camera can only photograph the outside of repression - and our sympathy with Amir is tested further by the blank-faced coldness of the young actor playing him.
On the other hand, the movie sketches a smart and subtle portrait of Kabul before the fall - before the Soviet tanks rolled in, before the Taliban took over, back when Afghanistan's soul belonged to more than its mullahs. Amir's father, confident in his hip '70s suits, is an embodiment of that soul, as is the father's friend, the more quietly observant Rahim Khan (Shaun Toub from "Crash," giving the strongest performance in the movie).
"The Kite Runner" re-creates Amir's and Baba's harrowing escape from the invading Russians over the Khyber Pass and comes to ground in central California. Amir (now played by Khalid Abdalla, one of the terrorists in "United 93") graduates from college as a wannabe novelist and Baba pumps gas - another poke at our Western complacency, inviting us to see the backstory every time we pull up to the pump. The scenes in America have a mawkish but satisfying comic ordinariness to them: the drama of learning to fit in.
Amir needs absolution, though. In an odd way, "The Kite Runner" parallels another current book-to-film property, "Atonement." Both films wonder how (and if) youthful wrongs can be forgiven, but while "Atonement" finds an answer in art and austerity, Hosseini's tale is more literal: the now-married Amir plunges back into Afghanistan and confronts the Taliban's crimes in an effort to come to grips with his own misdeeds.
This is the angst-ridden daydream of every émigré - to return home and get it right, earning love and respect from those who stayed (in this case Said Taghmaoui as Amir's cynical driver). Where the book turned overwrought to the point of masochism, though, Forster pulls back, easing up on most of the coincidences except the big one involving the return of a bully from Amir's youth.
I'm of two minds about this. A movie that held on to all the breathless tearjerkery of the novel would probably have to star Bette Davis as Amir, but as amended by Forster the story is now touching and somewhat dull. The movie glances at the real horrors of a theocratic dictatorship - the public stonings, the private power-mongering - but only on the way to soothing a fictional dilemma.
That's a loss. The symbolic self-flagellation Hosseini puts his hero through could make a great, crazy movie about guilt and homeland, assimilation and ethnic authenticity, but you'd need a less cautious cook to make it - one willing to break some eggs. "The Kite Runner" will be loved by many moviegoers for its taste and humanity, but for all the places Forster takes us he doesn't show us anything we haven't seen.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae /movies/blog.
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