It was only destiny that a novel as successful as Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner would be made into a movie. And it should have been. The story of sacrifice and redemption is certainly powerful and strikes a chord with many people, and it is well suited to the big screen. Director Marc Forster knows his way around stories that push emotional buttons, too -- for whatever they lacked in subtlety, his previous efforts (Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction) showed a real gift for finding the heart of an unadorned narrative and capturing the complexities of childhood with a deft touch.

The Kite Runner is no exception in that regard. The movie follows the story of a privileged young boy of Kabul, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), whose secular father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi, who starred in the Iranian film A Taste of Cherry) shields the boy from the hard realities of life even before the communist takeover of Kabul in 1979 and subsequent Soviet invasion. Amir's only friend, Hassan, is the son of Baba's servant, Ali (Nabi Tanha) -- and he is not only Amir's friend, but his protector and kite runner. The boys are deft touches at competitive kite-flying, and Hassan is a genius at tracking them down even before they land.

There are undertones of Afghanistan's class structure here, though. Hassan and his father are ethnic Hazara, considered inferior by the majority ethnic Pashtuns who dominate in Kabul; a trio of neighborhood bullies, led by Assef, don't let Hassan forget it, or let Amir forget that Hassan is his only friend, and a servant's son at that. That bullying reaches its low point immediately after the city's great kite competition, where Amir and Hassan do battle in the skies over Kabul against other flyers. Trying to find Hassan, Amir finally locates him -- cornered by Assef and his gang, Hassan refuses to give up Amir's kite, instead facing a harsh fate.

That fate is something you've no doubt heard about: an (off-screen) rape of a child. It's handled tastefully (as much as such a thing can be), but without sapping the scene of its tragedy and power. Still, it is disturbing, and it has only become more so given the film's back story: The young actor who plays Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, who is extraordinary in the role), had to leave his native Afghanistan for fear of retribution from Islamic fundamentalists there, and claims he never would have done the scene had he known it was in the script.

Hassan pays a steep price yet again for his loyalty to Amir: Ashamed of his cowardice in hiding during Hassan's victimization, Amir rejects his faithful friend completely, manipulating events to force Ali to leave the home he has served faithfully for so many years. It's that guilt that Amir carries with him as his father leads their escape from the Soviet onslaught, even as they find themselves in their new American home years later. Amir will find a chance for redemption, though, even as his first novel is being published; will he seize the opportunity to find the courage in himself that he could not find in his friend's defense then?

Although the story has a simple structure, Forster and screenwriter David Benioff never let the setting nor the gravity of events overwhelm the performances of the child actors or their adult counterparts. There are certainly landmarks to the gathering storms surrounding the late 1970s Kabul of Amir's childhood, and the painful memories of Amir's escape and his guilt over Hassan's fate linger in Khalid Abdalla's portrayal of the adult Amir. Abdalla has a tough task here: Holding up his end of the story, as the adult writer, without getting upstaged by his own flashback.

Some critics are complaining that the film is too neutral on U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, including our government's covert funding of the very Mujahadeen from which the Taliban came. Fair enough, but this is a personal story about friendship, betrayal, and redemption; digging deeper into the twisted history of late 20th century Afghanistan is best suited for a documentary or a film about the conflicting policies of nations using the ancient land as a proxy for their struggles, as was true of the Soviets and Americans in the 1970s and '80s, the U.S. DEA and other drug warriors since then, and the non-proxy war on Islamic terrorism since 9/11.

That said, there are some very uneven passages in The Kite Runner. Once Amir's decided to head back to Pakistan (and then on to Afghanistan) for a rescue mission, the movie shifts gears into a high-speed action flick (with some rather jolting shifts in cat-and-mouse -- one huge hole in particular has Amir and his cohort barely escaping Taliban guards, at the compound, and then -- suddenly -- they're crossing the border. Huh? What happened to the pursuit?

 

I could've stood for a little more development in Amir's relationship with his wife, Saroya (Atossa Leoni), as well. It's not hard to see what he sees in her luminous beauty and kindness; it's a little tougher to grasp her attraction to him. 

 

A bigger problem, though, is Amir. His character failures make him very hard to sympathize with, even though we're getting the story through his memories, for the most part. Khalid Abdalla got dealt a tough hand here; what works in the narrative of a novel, where sympathy with the narrator is usually seamless, is tougher to achieve on film. Abdalla is a very capable actor, but he never drew me in to Amir's inner struggle as much as I wanted him to. 

 

But the film's strengths outweigh those deficiencies. The kite battles are wonderful to behold, beyond their obvious metaphoric role. Cinematographer Roberto Schaefer's photography of these kite battles is a highlight of the film, as are the crisp sounds of wind against the kites' surfaces. And how refreshing it is to see a major studio release in which there are no "stars," and a significant portion of the dialogue is in Dari, a dialect of Farsi spoken in Afghanistan (with subtitles, of course).

Ultimately, though, this is a tale that, for all its exotic elements (to the American sensibility), is as familiar as any story of family, tragedy, betrayal, and redemption can be. The Kite Runner never quite pulls it altogether the way I hoped it would -- there are none of those astonishing moments that, say, Majid Majidi creates in his wonderful films -- but it gathers enough of the right elements to make it a satisfying experience and a welcome film for the warmth of the Christmas Season.

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