The Kite Runner

There are so many thrilling moments in The Kite Runner, moments so rarely witnessed in contemporary mainstream cinema, that it’s a must-see, despite its occasional missteps and excesses. Those who’ve read Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling novel will know it’s a populist epic tailor-made for the screen; the gripping narrative in particular, about two boyhood friends from different classes of Afghan society who are torn apart by both personal weakness and political turmoil, has all the intrigue of a classic yarn by Scott or Dickens (notably the latter’s A Tale of Two Cities).

Accordingly, director Marc Forster (Stranger Than Fiction, Monster’s Ball) takes a cue from Old Hollywood; even his opening credits could be from a Stanley Donen picture. The first part of The Kite Runner is, in fact, its best, chronicling the upbringings of the two main characters, principally through the sport of Gudiparan Bazi or kite fighting. The tone and pacing here are superb; yes, the filmmaking is conventional, but it’s conventionalism done right. Forster’s rendering of the familiar innocence-lost story is heartbreaking and thoroughly dark; characters’ relationships with objects (not just kites, but watches, movies, pomegranates, dirt) give scenes a mystic resonance that is reminiscent of such master directors as Michael Curtiz and William Wyler.

The Kite Runner has a disappointing middle section, but picks up with an almost off-putting fervour at its end. Forster clearly sees in Hosseini’s novel a tale of manhood—of what it means, truly, to be a man—and this will no doubt come off as gauche and maudlin to some. (Indeed, the film’s frequent incidences and metaphorical use of sodomy only compound the provocativeness of this theme). Yet when Amir (Khalid Abdala) finally returns to Afghanistan in the film’s last half-hour, there is no mistaking The Kite Runner’s force. War has, as in Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives, become the ultimate allegory for the human soul—in which goodness is always under siege, and pain is a spectre whose exorcism is often the fight of a lifetime. SEE IT NOW

The Kite Runner is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).