The Kite Runner
Directed by Marc Forster

The Kite Runner is enormously affecting, but it's not very good. This makes it a perfect cinematic adaptation of the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini about Afghanistan. The movie's superb screenwriter, David Benioff, has expertly streamlined Hosseini's sprawling and episodic novel into a tight two-hour film, and in doing so, actually improves on the original. Still, as both novel and movie, The Kite Runner is a lumpy melodrama with too-good-to-be-true characters and wildly implausible plot twists that strain even minimal credulity. And yet somehow, in both its forms, The Kite Runner is basically beyond criticism.

The true purpose of The Kite Runner is didactic, and nobly so. It provides an easily digestible guide to one of the world's most unfortunately important places with the intent of branding its troubles on the popular imagination, and it succeeds brilliantly. The Kite Runner is an effective reminder of the world-changing nature of the Soviet invasion in 1979, of the moral and practical value of the removal of the Taliban from power in 2001, and a message to Afghans themselves about why their tribal rivalries are foolish, disastrous, and immoral.

Hosseini compresses Afghanistan's suffering into the experience of two Afghan boys, one a high-born Pashtun named Amir and the other a lowly Hazara named Hassan, who are nine years old when the story begins in the mid-1970s. They are close friends, but, as is true of their fathers, they are also master and servant. The servant boy is brave and noble and

The movie, like the book, milks to great effect the primal anxiety that comes from showing torments and trials visited on little boys, whose effort to assume a manly stiff upper lip in the face of abuse only points out how small and defenseless they actually are. Both Hosseini and the movie's director, Marc Forster, display a brutally effective Dickensian ghoulishness in this regard. Forster takes a scene directly out of the book in which a boy is forced to act like a dancing monkey and turns it into a moment of almost unbearably sickening power.

Amir's lonely guilt toward Hassan haunts him throughout his adulthood until a twist of fate affords him a chance at clearing his conscience. To do so, Amir, now an American citizen living in Silicon Valley, must sneak back to Afghanistan in disguise during the height of Taliban rule.

In seeking his redemption, Amir is also trying to live up to the example set by his own father, Baba. On their difficult trek out of Afghanistan in the back of a truck following the Soviet invasion, Baba shows his heroic mettle by confronting a Soviet soldier who will only allow their truck to pass if he is allowed to rape a woman riding with them.

"I'll take a thousand of his bullets before I'll let this indecency take place," Baba says, and is only saved from death when the soldier's superior arrives and tells the would-be rapist to let the truck pass.