Picture millions of moviegoers eventually seeing a movie due to good word of mouth. Or picture film critics, awards ceremonies and the Academy setting aside that there are no stars whatsoever in this film. To someone who has not read the book, the title and film may be hard to understand. And given the film is mostly spoken in Dari and features all foreign actors, many of them rookies, many have speculated that the film will fall short, that it too will become one of a long list of award-winning, “multi-platinum” novels that fails at the big-screen level. In “The Kite Runner” director Mark Forster (”Finding Neverland” and “Monster’s Ball”) brings the book to screen with no additions and few omissions, a formula that is a complete success for this film. It is not destined to become a failure if more people see this great, thoroughly involving film. It is simply the best film of the year.
Taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and San Francisco, the film is a relatively epic film. I say relatively only in that the story spans close to 30 years and is a portrait of the history of modern Afghanistan. It doesn’t really have a beautiful female lead and all the conventional facets of an epic, but the emotion of the story is very real, and it becomes more and more potent as time progresses in the story. Amir and Hassan are friends although Hassan is also his servant. Newcomers and complete non–actors, Hhalid Abdalla and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada play these characters as boys growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1970s. Class issues already plague their friendship, but on the day of a famous annual kite race, their lives are divided. The incoming war with the then Soviet Union would doom their hopes even further.
Amir and his father eventually move to America and when next we see Amir, he is grown and presented with a major chance to redeem himself and his friend. The story is incredibly detailed and rich. The novel’s author Khalid Hosseini was born in Kabul and has used so many details from his life to support this film’s reality. Bravo to Forster for enriching what was there and letting it linger on the screen. Across the board the film is excellent, from acting, to set design to cinematography. It was an impressive and ballsy idea to make a $40 million dollar film with sub-titles. It works very well and should not be ignored. After “Beloved”, “Bridges of Madison County”, “The Horse Whisperer” and “Before and After”, this film actually works in symbiosis with the book and redeems the entire idea of the genre.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 22, 2007. Read the original PDF.