Review: The Kite Runner – gruelling drama that is everything Atonement should have been

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This is the powerful drama of redemption that Atonement should have been. The Kite Runner is the gruelling, compelling and at times shocking adaptation of Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 first novel. Beautifully filmed against a backdrop of the horrors of “modern” Afghanistan, the script is faithful to the book to the extent that entire sections of dialogue are repeated almost verbatim and the acting, by both the child and adult actors, is difficult to fault.

On its most basic level, the plot is similar to Ian McEwan’s Atonement, the recent film version of which failed to capture the novel’s essence for me. Two young Afghan boys, Amir, son of a wealthy Kabul businessman, and Hassan, their servant’s son, enjoy childhood together in the years before the 1979 Soviet invasion. After Hassan is savagely raped by the neighbourhood bully, Amir, repelled by witnessing it but too scared to intervene, makes a false complaint of theft against Hassan, whose life is shattered as a result. When the Russians invade, Amir’s father flees with him to America, where he grows up to become a novelist. A telephone call takes him on a perilous journey back to Afghanistan, now ruled by the merciless Taliban, to atone for the wrong he inflicted on his childhood friend more than 20 years before.

There the comparison with Atonement, close though it is, ends, not least because Swiss director Marc (Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball) Forster’s The Kite Runner is significantly more visceral a film than Englishman Joe (Pride and Prejudice) Wright’s Atonement.

Few countries have had a more benighted recent history than Afghanistan. The Kite Runner captures the tragedy of a nation through the lives of Amir and Hassan, beginning with the 1973 coup that ended the stable, 40 year reign of king Zahir Shah; the 1978 communist takeover followed by the Soviet invasion and occupation; and finally, the last, brutal days of Taliban rule early this century, just before the American-led invasion after September 11. The actors who play them as boys, Zekeria Ebrahimi (Amir) and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada (Hassan) are Kabul-raised Afghanis whose own lives have been changed by the film. Both have reportedly had to leave Afghanistan because they are in peril for taking part. Ahmad Khan has said he wants to continue acting “but the rape scene upset me because my friends will watch it and I won’t be able to go outside any more. They will think I was raped.” Khalid Abdalla, who plays Amir as an adult, is a British actor noted for his understated, composed portrayal of Ziad Jarrah, one of the September 11 hijackers, in United 93, the numbing 2006 film of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers rose against the hijackers. In The Kite Runner he brings the same acting skills to playing a bookish man who was a coward as a boy who must confront evil and shocking violence to gain redemption.

Most of the dialogue is in Farsi, with subtitles, and most of the actors are native speakers, as is Hosseini, who was born in Kabul, the middle-class son of a diplomat. Hosseini’s real life tracks the events in his novel and the film, which is probably why it is so realistic a narrative. His family left Afghanistan after Zahir Shah’s downfall, arriving in America as penniless refugees after the communist takeover in Kabul. He became a doctor (which the fictional Amir’s father, played superbly by Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi, wanted his son to become) before writing The Kite Runner. The use of Farsi not only increases the realism, it allows one particularly endearing moment to be portrayed even better than in the book, which of course is written in English. Amir and Hassan are fond of westerns and see The Magnificent Seven 13 times, but they do not realise the Farsi they are watching it in has been dubbed, and so believe that Charles Bronson speaks Farsi with an Iranian accent.

Kite-flying is an important part of Afghan culture, with wildly popular kite festivals held involving contestants who seek to cut the strings of the other kites until only one remains aloft. When the Taliban took over, they banned kite-flying along with every other joy of life including music, films and dance. In the story, Amir is a cerebral boy who loves poetry and novels, much to the disdain of his father, but his skill as a kite-flyer is unsurpassed and he wins the contest on the day Hassan, a member of the subjugated Hazara ethnic group, is beaten and raped after running through the streets of Kabul chasing the last kite Amir cut down. The racist bully who sodomises Hassan is, like Amir, from the dominant Pashtuns, and later re-emerges as a sanctimonious, hypocritical leading figure in the Taliban. The scenes of the attack on Hassan, and Amir’s betrayal of him, are gruelling enough, but nothing can match the graphic depiction of the monstrous barbarity of the Taliban when the adult Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab, who has been forced to become a Taliban catamite. Amir goes to the Kabul soccer stadium in search of the Taliban leader he must find to locate the boy, and there witnesses the ghastly, wicked stoning to death of a burqa-clad woman accused of adultery. This scene, which is almost impossible to watch yet impossible not to, is all the more awful because such events at that soccer stadium were real and happened regularly and, even worse, similar barbarities still take place today (albeit employing hanging from a mobile crane rather than being pelted with rocks) in the soccer stadium in Tehran in neighbouring Iran, ruled by religious fanatics whose only saving grace is they are not as bad as the Taliban. There is a twist in the plot that makes the story even more shocking, and deeply sad, than I can reveal here, because I don’t want to spoil a key element of it for anyone who has not yet read the book or seen the film.

Out of five stars, I have no hesitation in giving The Kite Runner four and a half. Highly recommended.

The Kite Runner, starring Khalid Abdalla, Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ali Dinesh, Homayoun Ershadi, Atossa Leoni, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, Nasser Memarzia and Shaun Toub, directed by Marc Forster. 128 minutes, M – violence and offensive language. ****½

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