Marc Forster, the German-born cosmopolitan filmmaker with a quiet, sheepherder-like demeanor and a diverse resume, probably seemed like a smart choice to helm a globe-trotting narrative like The Kite Runner, which requires sensitivity on multiple fronts. A close look at his filmography, however, uncovers some pertinent weaknesses: for rosy pap over substance (see Finding Neverland), coincidence-driven climaxes over earned resolutions (see Stay), as well as a littering of bombastic musical swells — all shortcomings that are indulged and encouraged by Khaled Hosseini's source novel. The meeting of these two sentimentalists achieves predictably balmy results. Forster also never met a nuanced or pretty moment that couldn't be improved by stretching it to 20 minutes, the latest example being The Kite Runner's signature, endless "kite fighting" scenes — unimpressive CGI-rendered dogfights in which kids in the streets of 1970s Kabul try to slice each other's kite strings, mid-flight.
In those dusty Kabul streets, we briefly glimpse a society that's alive and working. Western culture is not yet a threat — The Magnificent Seven draws a matinee crowd at a local cinema — and the future of two young boys seems most defined by the fact that one of them, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), is a wealthy Pashtun and his running-mate, Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada), is a minority Hazara. Their biggest joy is flying those kites and their biggest fear is becoming the playthings of an aggressive pack of local bullies. Ironically, it's those petty hoods, not the cinema or the busy street fairs, that most indicate the future, when the Soviet invasion will crack up society's natural order and allow the virulent Taliban a brief foothold to power. The film covers that expansive story at both ends, jumping from pre-civil-war bliss to the 1980s, then to 2000, all while following some characters to America.
The scope of the narrative isn't as much a problem as is The Kite Runner's bizarre ideas about human nature, chiefly evinced by the decision to portray 12-year-old Hassan as a boy saint. After he's raped in an alleyway by the aforementioned bullies — a key scene so marred by paranoid cutting that if you turn your head for an instant you won't register what's happening — his presence begins to engender shame in Amir, who was hiding nearby but was too scared to intervene. Amir's manhood is hereafter insulted by Hassan's very existence, and he begins to heap abuse on his friend, which Hassan accepts as though he's physically incapable of anger, let alone reprisal. When Amir smears a pomegranate on him, Hassan smears another on himself. When Amir tries to have Hassan and his father evicted from their servant's quarters on a trumped-up charge of stealing, Hassan falsely confesses to the crime. Could any child ever be this sanctimonious?
The Soviet invasion eventually forces Amir and his father, Baba, (a nuanced and engaging performance by Homayoun Ershadi) to decamp to America, where The Kite Runner finds it has some interesting things to say about the way America's immigration machine can turn generals and captains of industry into gas station attendants and flea market proprietors. Though it's too late for Baba to mentally divest himself of Afghanistan, Amir begins a long road of deracination, and there's eventually a courtship with a former Afghan general's daughter and a promising writing career. Still, his childhood betrayal of Hassan isn't forgotten. One day in 2000 (adult Amir is played by United 93's Khalid Abdalla) a voice on the phone informs him, like some cryptic religious telemarketer, that "there is a way to be good again." Turns out it's an old family friend back in Afghanistan, calling to dangle an offer of atonement.
The less said about the film's third act the better; suffice it to say that what transpires is a completely unconvincing kidnap-adventure yarn, with the clean-cut Afghan-American Amir wandering through the streets of a ruined Kabul decked out in mullah garb and a glue-on party-store beard, trying to locate a child and steal him back over the border before being detected as a poseur by the real McCoys who patrol the streets in pickup trucks and herd religious offenders to an abandoned soccer stadium for summary execution. Before it's all over, we'll even get a villain comeuppance scene that leaves reality so far behind it would be more appropriate in an Indiana Jones movie than in a film with pretensions to cultural or dramatic seriousness.
The Kite Runner has its moments, but to reach them requires a strong stomach for artless manipulation and an unnatural fascination with watching people fly kites that aren't really there.
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