Marc Forster’s (Stranger than Fiction, Monster’s Ball) adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best selling novel The Kite Runner is a movie I wanted to like far more than I actually did. While there are moments of sublime rapture and poignant emotional arias to be found in the production, thanks to a clunky and unfocused final third this film just didn’t resonate for me. Worse, the longer I think on it the more this colossal blunder on the director’s part starts to gnaw at me, what should have been a magnificent journey of friendship and redemption instead sits in my memory as nothing more than a frustrating disappointment.

Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada and Zekiria Ebrahimi in Paramount Vantage's The Kite Runner

The potential for greatness here is staggering. While the opening moments of the tale introducing things are a bit banal, Foster and screenwriter David Benioff (Troy) quickly submerge us within the world of pre-Soviet invasion Afghanistan and the lives of two young friends, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) and Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada). With dexterous grace we see their homeland as if shot directly through the children’s eyes, the maze of dusty streets and shimmer of stone white thoroughfares as homely as the ones in the very neighborhood I grew up in.

Quickly we grasp that this friendship is something of a complicated affair, Amir the son of a powerful public figure while Hassan is the child of the family’s caretaker. Yet they are inseparable, and whether combining their powers to win a local kite flying contest or carving their names into the bark of a hillside tree theirs is a friendship sure to stand the test of time.

Or so they think. After Amir is unable to come to Hassan’s aid when he is cornered by a group of fiercely xenophobic bullies, the bond between the two is put to the ultimate test. Bad choice follows worse decision, and soon the two are separated with the former escaping to America with his father before the Soviet’s invade while the other stays with his papa struggling to make a life for themselves in an ever-changing Kabul.

Years pass and a now middle-aged Amir (Khalid Abdalla) marries and becomes a successful author, but nothing he does can change the guilt he still feels due to what happened back in Afghanistan. Suddenly the phone rings offering him the chance to be a better man than he’s ever been before. He cannot change what happened, cannot undue the past, but he can save the life of his former friend’s son, in the process finding redemption for the mistakes made so very long ago.

Let’s get this out of the way right from the start. I loved the middle section of this movie. The hour or so spent with young Amir and Hassan is absolutely spellbinding. Their relationship breathes and moves like the wind carrying their kites, the ultimate horror done to one of them suitably devastating yet nowhere near as tragic as the fear keeping the other from doing the right thing. Yet this mistake is horrifically understandable, the trepidation and uncertainties of youth hard for anyone to conquer let alone an individual faced with the brutality found here.

Both of primary child actors are extraordinary. Discovered (along with fellow newcomer Ali Danesh who fearlessly portrays Hassan’s son Sohrab) literally on the streets of Afghanistan, both Ebrahimi and Mahmidzada are delicately rapturous performances whose eyes belie oceanic tide pools of emotional depth. They are magnificent, and the whole time The Kite Runner revolved around them I discovered to my unabashed delight I simply couldn’t take my eyes away from it.

That changes, and not for the better, as things fast forward twenty years. Watching elder Amir tramp around San Francisco before heading back to a Taliban controlled Kabul is tedious and maudlin. Watching his courtship of an amazingly wooden Atossa Leoni pretty much drove me around the bend, and if not for the stalwart and galvanizing presence of Homayoun Ershadi as the man’s world-weary and wise father none of what transpires here would have been worth a single second of my time.

Yet none of this compares to the actual events on the ground in Afghanistan. Amir suddenly transforms himself into a Middle Eastern James Bond and the effect borders on the laughable. Slowly but surely, Forster drains both power and emotion from the story, resorting to tiredly cliché tricks to try and keep the momentum of the movie moving forward. But nothing works, and by the time things finally return to California I was starting to think somewhere along the way the projectionist slipped in the wrong reel and we were now watching a completely different motion picture. 

Pity, because that meaty midsection of the tale is truly wondrous. For a little over an hour I was given insight into a world I could only have imagined, any theories I might have assembled thanks to the nightly news or the daily paper shattered into something utterly different and far more profound. I wanted to see more of young Amir and Hassan, their friendship as moving and as timeless as any I could possibly imagine. As long is it focuses on them, The Kite Runner soars. If only the rest of it could fly near as high. 

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  The Kite Runner Theatrical Trailer