"The Kite Runner

'Kite Runner' Timely, Moving

"The Kite Runner" is an elegiac personal tragedy, a movie about guilt, shame, loyalty and friendship.

A tender redemptive tale of two boys who grow up to be men, with one taking much longer to grow up than the other, it reminds us that guilt endures even when relationships don't.

But if there is any claim to "epic" in this film based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini, it is its vivid depiction of the consequences of "Islamo-fascism," a before-and-after picture of Afghanistan that shows a land where civilization came to an abrupt end. You'd swear this Afghan "Killing Fields" was science fiction if we hadn't actually watched it happen.

In 1978, Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is a child of wealth, a passive, sensitive boy who likes to "make up stories."

Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, an open-faced wonder) is the son of Amir's family servant, an illiterate innocent who is Amir's best friend, his protector. They are like brothers. They do everything together and are at their very best when they fly their kite at Kabul's big kite festival. When they swoop in and cut the string of a foe in the sea of paper designs fluttering over the city, no one is better at running down and claiming the vanquished toy than Hassan, the greatest kite runner of them all.

But Amir's passivity bugs his widowed dad, played with warmth and character-building bluffness by Homayoun Ershadi

"A boy who won't stand up for himself becomes a man who won't stand up for anything."

Amir's cowardice shows when Hassan, a member of the lower caste Hazara tribe, is assaulted by Pashtun bullies. He compounds his crime against his friend by finding a way to kick Hassan and his father out of his house. Hassan won't be there to remind Amir of his shame.

When the Russians roll in, Amir and his father flee across the border and make it to America (where Dad runs a convenience store). Years pass, Amir goes to college, marries and writes a novel.

That's when his past calls him back to Afghanistan to face his failings.

Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland") heightens the contrast between East and West. He keeps the simple thread of personal journey center stage and does well both by the lives the boys lead in pre-Soviet-invasion Afghanistan and Amir's American life, in which he hangs onto just enough Afghan customs to please his father.

Though the Soviet invasion shown here is anti-climactic, the escape to Pakistan is played for every ounce of harrowing that Forster can wring out of it. And scenes set in pre-9/11 Kabul, a moonscape denuded of trees, with "Beard Patrols" of Taliban fighters driving ruined streets ready to arrest or kill any man daring not to wear a beard and adhere to their interpretation of Islamic law, are beyond chilling.

Khalid Abdalla, as the adult Amir, takes the character's childhood passivity to an extreme, which renders him a bit dull. But his Amir is still the writer, the sensitive observer. Events and characters around him are much richer, more colorful than he could ever be.

"Kite Runner" takes us on a journey from picaresque and irreverent (Amir's dad calls the fundamentalist mullahs "bearded monkeys") to hopeful and universal. Visually arresting, politically controversial, perhaps its greatest virtue is its simple message of making wrong right. As Amir's dying uncle tells him when he summons the expatriate back to Afghanistan, "It's a very bad time. But you should come. Now, there is a way to be good again."

That sort of second chance is all any of us could ever hope for.

THE KITE RUNNER is a Paramount Classics release directed by Marc Forster from a screenplay by David Benioff based on the novel by Khaled Hosseini. Running time: 122 minutes. Rated PG-13 for strong thematic material including the rape of a child, violence and brief strong language. Opens today in area theaters.

Guilt trip takes Afghan immigrant back to familiar place.
Like Pan's Labyrinth in 2006, The Kite Runner is a movie about children but not for children.

The children here are two Afghan boys in 1970s Kabul. Bookish, tentative Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi) is the son of a stern, wealthy father. Cheerful Hassan (Ahmed Khan Mahmidzada) is Amir's servant and best friend.

One winter day, the two cooperate to fend off the other children of Kabul during a competition in which kites with glass-coated strings are used to cut the strings of other players' kites until only one winning kite remains in the sky.

Once the kites are "liberated," other children chase them down.

Hassan, a champion "kite runner," offers to fetch a prize kite for Amir. When Hassan refuses to give up the kite to some older boys, he is brutally assaulted.

Amir witnesses the attack but is too scared to interfere or even to acknowledge that it has happened. His cowardice affects the lives of all involved, and the guilt he feels follows him through the decades.

Amir flees Kabul with his father after the Russian invasion, and attends high school and college in California while his father works at a gas station.

He marries and publishes his first novel. Then he receives a call from an old family friend, who tells him "There is a way to be good again," and he finds himself back in Afghanistan, now under the control of the Taliban.

David Benioff has adapted Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel with a sure hand, leaving out a few of the more melodramatic incidents and suggesting rather than showing much of the violence. He maintains the essentials of the plot as well as the book's elegiac tone.

Director Marc Forster (Finding Neverland), filming mostly in China, vividly re-creates scenes of life in the old Kabul, which contrast troublingly with present-day scenes. Most of the dialogue is subtitled, and careful attention has been paid to historical detail and to the life of Afghan immigrants in the United States.

Alberto Iglesias' evocative score adds to the film's underlying melancholy and soars in its rare moments of joy.

The boys acting the parts of Amir and Hassan are simple and unaffected, and their friendship seems genuine.

As the grown Amir, Khalid Abdalla (United 93) has dignity, although it's not always easy to sympathize with his constant mopiness.

The Kite Runner moves slowly and doesn't always overcome the weight of coincidence, but at its best, is a moving story of redemption and a window into a lost world.