Lofty intentions

Childhood friends Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, left) and Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) are separated by an act of betrayal in Marc Forster’s film The Kite Runner. (Paramount Vantage)

Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling 2003 novel The Kite Runner is, among other things, a tale of a childhood paradise lost. The depiction of that loss — as much historical as it is personal — turns out to be the most striking aspect of director Marc Forster’s faithful but low-key film version.

The movie’s early scenes take place in 1970s, pre-Soviet-invasion Afghanistan, which, while wintry and rugged, is vibrant with life. Marketplaces bustle, cinemas are packed and the pomegranate trees are studded with the succulent red fruit. For the young Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), the privileged only son of a wealthy Pashtun widower, it’s an idyllic time, spent mostly in the company of his best friend, his faithful Hazara servant Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada). Together, the two boys pass their days reading Persian classics, watching Hollywood westerns and engaging in aerial warfare with kites above the snow-dusted roofs of Kabul.

When the adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla), a writer, returns to his homeland in 2000 after a long exile in the United States, he finds a country ravaged by the departed Russians and scourged by the new Taliban. The trees have been chopped down to stumps, the deserted streets are strewn with rubble and the soccer stadiums are used for public executions. It’s a startling before-and-after picture — shot in contrasting tones by cinematographer Roberto Schaefer — that sums up the tragedy of Afghanistan at the end of the 20th century. It also serves as the backdrop to a private tragedy involving an act of cowardice. For Amir’s idyll doesn’t end with the arrival of the Soviet army, but on the day that he secretly witnesses Hassan’s sexual abuse by Pashtun bullies — and does nothing to stop it.

This rape scene, which comes early in the film and is crucial to the plot, has earned The Kite Runner a lot of unwanted advance publicity. Earlier this fall, the families of the young Afghan actors who appear in the movie claimed they were not informed of the scene before it was shot and feared reprisals in their community. As a result, the picture’s release was delayed until the studio was able to move the boys out of Afghanistan to the United Arab Emirates for safety. The actual scene is discreet by Western standards, the sodomy suggested in a few quick shots — a belt unbuckled, pants yanked down. But the portrayal of a Pashtun abusing a Hazara would likely be as incendiary in Afghanistan as the sex act itself.

There is not a whiff of controversy anywhere else in this quiet film. Hosseini, an Afghan-American, may write eloquently about the woes of his birthplace, but he isn’t a political author, and The Kite Runner is essentially a heart-warming tale of redemption. The grown-up Amir, still gnawed with guilt over his betrayal of Hassan, is finally given a chance “to be good again.” Since the rape scene is already out of the bag, it wouldn’t do to spoil any more of the plot by saying how Amir makes amends; let’s just say it requires him to finally summon the courage he lacked as a boy.

Baba (Homayoun Ershadi, right) is the respected father of Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), moving in high circles before fleeing Afghanistan. (Paramount Vantage)

How much you buy into Hosseini’s old-fashioned story, which relies on 19th-century plot devices behind its contemporary trappings, will determine how much you enjoy Forster’s film. Regardless, the picture lacks a strong central performance. Amir is your standard sensitive writer-hero, passive and introspective, and it’s difficult to become fully engaged in his need to overcome his shame. In the novel, Amir tells his own story and allows us to understand his agony, but David Benioff’s screenplay scraps the narration. And Abdalla, a curly-haired Anglo-Egyptian actor who played the highjacker-pilot in United 93, is too soft and muted to communicate inner turmoil.

Instead, you find yourself focusing on Homayoun Ershadi as Baba, Amir’s worldly father, a charismatic and formidable figure whose heroism is a stark contrast to his son’s timidity. Iranian-Canadian actor Ershadi (who played the lead in Abbas Kiarostami’s haunting A Taste of Cherry) is not the larger-than-life Baba of the book, but he reshapes the role to fit his own saturnine qualities. We first meet him as a handsome, Westernized Afghani sahib with a taste for whisky and fast cars; later, as a struggling immigrant in the U.S., Baba is reduced to working in a gas station and flea market. Yet his natural dignity remains unimpaired. That may be a stereotype by now, but he plays it with conviction.

The other standout is child actor Khan Mahmoodzada as Hassan. Small and solid, with a round, heavy face expressive of calm stoicism, he suggests that very unmodern character, the born servant — someone who takes pride in his unswerving loyalty. His scenes with Ebrahimi’s young Amir catch the way they continually seesaw between a friendship and a master-servant dynamic. Not that there’s ever any doubt as to their positions: the well-groomed Amir wears a smart new ski vest, while lowly Hassan is clad in a traditional chapan.

Forster, whose experience directing kids includes Finding Neverland, gets nice, understated performances from his young actors. When they and Ershadi are onscreen, The Kite Runner achieves emotional lift-off. But Forster isn’t able to keep the film at that height and, by the end, he’s dipped down to melodrama and action-movie cliché, even reducing the authentically horrific Taliban to stock villains.

I don’t know whether it’s this unevenness or the plot’s conventions, but I came away from the film moved less by the story than by its backdrop — that picture of poor, luckless Afghanistan, a country that has come to mean a lot more to us in the last six years.

The Kite Runner opens across Canada on Dec. 14.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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