Spanning two-plus decades and a couple continents, director
Marc Forster’s adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner tells a culturally specific émigré’s tale
that still manages to locate the universality of the long shadow of adolescent
trauma.
Unfolding in flashback fashion, the story covers three discrete
time periods. In 1978
12-year-old Amir’s friendship with Hassan, the son of his father’s most
faithful servant, dissolves in the wake of an act of ethnically-motivated
violence and the shameful silence that follows. A decade later, after relocating
to
Soviet invasion, the now adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla, above left), an aspiring writer, meets
and marries Soraya (Atossa Leoni), the daughter of another Afghan expatriate, in
an old-fashioned courtship. Another decade on, Amir’s successful life is thrown
into disarray when he discovers that the now-deceased Hassan had a young son
(Ali Dinesh, above right) who is now an orphan. The still-guilt-ridden Amir travels to
in order to rescue the boy and bring him to
David Benioff’s script strips the movie of a first-person
narrator but otherwise artfully condenses a difficult tale, and Forster’s
direction is for the most part wonderfully understated; particularly affecting
are the film’s adolescent performances. The homestretch run of Amir’s visit to
war-torn Kabul offers up melodrama and some dubious twists, and the setting and
subdued nature of the material additionally make this film a tough sell beyond
the upscale lit-market crowd that made a bestseller out of Hosseini’s tome. Still,
if one submits to the quiet rhythms of this slightly overlong tale, there is certainly
some measure of reward to be found, particularly in a time when smart
cross-cultural audits are important as well as enriching. For the slightly redacted capsule review, from CityBeat, click here. (Paramount Classics/DreamWorks, 123 minutes, R)