KEY POINTS:
Herald Rating: * * *
Cast: Khalid Abdalla, Homayoun Ershadi, Zekiria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, Shaun Toub, Ali Danesh Bakhtyari, Atossa Leoni
Director: Marc Forster
Running time: 122 mins
Rating: M, contains violence and offensive language
Screening: Everywhere from Boxing Day
Verdict: A faithful, literal adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel gets off the ground but never soars.
Plenty of others have observed the striking similarity between this and another major summer release, Atonement. The settings are as different as might be imagined - although the shadow of war stretches across each story - but they are both about acts, committed in childhood and regretted into adulthood, whose effects ripple through many lives. In both tales, the main character seeks to redeem the past by writing about it. And that's perhaps why both films - although honest, high-quality productions - fail to touch the heart: the writer's internal process, so easy to apprehend while reading, is stubbornly resistant to on-screen depiction.
Hosseini's elegantly structured novel was a memoir that worked both as adventure story and metaphysical thriller. Its sentimentality - and some of its implausible coincidences - were easily forgiven because of the lyrical writing and the narrator's scrupulous, fearless honesty. But the screenplay (by David Benioff, who wrote Troy and adapted his own elegiac novel The 25th Hour for Spike Lee) never comes close to catching the complicated internal process that drove the original. It touches all the narrative bases - indeed, at times, its faithfulness to the novel feels slavish and reverential - but the story feels compressed, deliberate and artificial, stripped of its pungent moral ambiguities.
We meet Amir (Abdalla) as a successful author - an Afghan emigre living in San Francisco - whose joy over his new novel, the tellingly named A Season for Ashes, is interrupted by a phone call from his past.
The film that follows unspools as two parallel flashbacks: of Amir's first years in America and of his childhood in Kabul, where his best friend is Hassan (Khan), the son of his father's servant. Hassan acts as his kite runner, fetching the kites Amir downs in the contests fought in the air above the city. But one day, something unspeakable happens to the servant boy and Amir makes a decision he will forever regret.
The film is at its best in evoking life among Kabul's middle-class before the Soviet invasion. Passages in California, where the adult Amir meets the woman (Leoni) he will marry, feel formulaic and those in Kabul (shot in China) are so melodramatic as to verge on vaudeville. Extravagant CGI shots of the kites are out of sync with the naturalistic feel of the film.
Forster has tried and failed before, in the turgid, marginally offensive Monster's Ball, to depict complicated emotional process. This film also feels flat and unconvincing. At times it flies, but it never comes close to soaring.
