Beyond the Multiplex

"The Kite Runner": Harry Potter vs. the Taliban, with a ululating soundtrack
There are moments here and there in Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner" (adapted from Hosseini's novel by David Benioff) when the film relaxes into something like transparency and actually shows us aspects of the world we might not know about, which feels real down to the details. As a re-creation of the lost world of middle-class, Westernized Afghanistan in the 1970s, complete with disco parties, American muscle cars and Steve McQueen movies, "The Kite Runner" is often sad and charming.

When that world is transported to America after the Soviet invasion, and the protagonist Amir's dignified father (marvelously played by Homayoun Ershadi) is reduced to working in a convenience store and selling knickknacks at a flea market in suburban California, the film abounds with small visual ironies. When Amir (Khalid Abdalla) is courting a fellow Afghan immigrant named Soraya (Atossa Leoni), they go for a walk with her mother trailing behind as a chaperone, old-world style. But they walk through tract houses with aluminum siding, cyclone fencing and Pontiacs in the driveway, rather than through the alleys and marketplaces of old Kabul.

Such details are also wistfully evident in Hosseini's novel, but always filtered through Amir's backward-looking consciousness, increasingly aware as he grows older that he is guilty of a personal, intimate betrayal that somehow mirrors the cruel fate of his country. Forster and Benioff have imported all the book's sentimentality, along with a melodramatic plot relying on an interlocking set of coincidences that would embarrass Dickens, while jettisoning the self-awareness and the lyrical flourishes that made it readable. What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial. It's only slightly unfair to summarize the movie's uplifting message this way: You got raped by the Taliban, kid? And your whole country is fucked beyond repair? Fly a kite and you'll feel better!

Sure, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, the kids who play Amir and his friend and/or servant Hassan as children, make a lovable pair. (These are two of the three child actors who have reportedly left Afghanistan, along with their families, in response to local consternation about the film's rape scene.) But the movie around them does them no favors. You can find adorable moppets not quite playing believable characters, plus an intrusive, quasi-ethnic drums 'n' wailing soundtrack that cues your emotions through every single scene, in AT&T or UPS commercials about how your business can thrive in the era of globalization.

What with the geographic and chronological hopscotching from Afghanistan to America and the seemingly endless and totally irrelevant CGI kite-flying sequences -- as if we're suddenly in a Harry Potter movie playing Squiddick, or whatever it's called -- "The Kite Runner" never settles on a single character or central theme. Abdalla and Leoni are such wooden performers, laboring to avoid "Middle Eastern" clichés by playing the young couple as the blandest and most faceless Americans you can imagine, that Amir's noble and tormented dad, so beautifully rendered by Ershadi, becomes the most magnetic character. But the story isn't supposed to be about him; it's supposed to be about how Amir long ago betrayed and abandoned the painfully loyal Hassan, and now, from his perch of American affluence, must find a way to make amends.

I must not be the first person to notice that "The Kite Runner" and Joe Wright's film version of "Atonement" have exactly the same plot: Rich kid destroys life of privileged underling, becomes writer due to ensuing deep thinking, does literary penance too little and too late. I think "Atonement" is a mixed bag too, but it was made by someone who thinks cinematically, who knows when to move the camera (and when not to). There is scarcely a shot in "The Kite Runner" longer than five seconds; two people will be holding a quiet conversation, and Forster and cinematographer Roberto Schaefer jump around the room on pogo sticks, pointlessly changing angles on every comma, every pause. Moments that should provoke quiet contemplation are needlessly exhausting.

Yes, the rape of a child is depicted in "The Kite Runner," although with entirely PG-rated imagery, and the rape of another child is implied and discussed. In both cases, the intention of author and filmmaker are clear: The shame falls upon those who allow such crimes to happen, not on those who endure them. Of course these scenes are heart-rending, and of course you will long to see these children rescued and some shred of redemption claimed from the awful situation. That's only human decency, and at least this maudlin, implausible and dull movie has that going for it.

"The Kite Runner" opens Dec. 14 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wide national release to follow.

Next page: Rescued lives in Nanking