Young actors give 'Kite Runner' its altitude

By Michael Sragow | Sun Movie Critic

December 21, 2007

(B) The Kite Runner lives in the galvanic performances of two young Afghan actors, Zekeria Ebrahimi and Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada. They bring home the torment of Afghan life before and after the Taliban and, just as important, the resilience of children everywhere.

With their help, director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Benioff's adaptation of Khaled Hosseini's beloved best-seller does a sensitive, potent job of depicting the ups and awful downs of an asymmetrical friendship.

Zekeria plays Amir, a well-off Pushtan boy, and Ahmad plays Hassan, his servant and bosom pal from the oppressed Hazara tribe. Amir, a budding writer, finds relief from disappointing his father in the admiration of Hassan, who adores his talent for reciting stories and inventing them. Amir's father, Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), considers the lad a weakling; Amir thinks Baba blames him for his mother's death in childbirth.

Amir transcends his feelings of inadequacy only when he and Hassan recall their favorite Steve McQueen movies, The Magnificent Seven and Bullitt, or enter kite-flying competitions with Hassan as chief strategist and "kite runner" (he retrieves Amir's kite whenever another cuts its string).

Their friendship functions like a marriage; most of the time, they are stronger together than apart. But Amir can't fully believe in Hassan's devotion because he doesn't think that he deserves it. When three older Pushtan boys rape Hassan, and Amir, hidden, witnesses the atrocity, the sight of it paralyzes him instead of pushing him into action. And Amir is the one who can't let go of the experience.

Like the twists of ruined-childhood-friendship films such as Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, Amir turns his self-loathing inside out and makes Hassan his target. He throws pomegranates at him - and Hassan, never swerving from the devotion that has formed his identity, takes a pomegranate and smashes it in his own face. It's a stunning moment, one of the most wrenching in movies this year.

Ahmad is heart-shriveling as Hassan, a rare contemporary character who surprises you with the depth of his goodness. He gives a preternatural performance, with all the exuberance of childhood and the underlying resignation of a saint. Yet it wouldn't work without Zekeria's startling embodiment of psychological agony and reflexive treachery.

Most of The Kite Runner doesn't approach their level of accomplishment. The story of the grown Amir (Khalid Abdalla) constricts the narrative instead of merely framing it. Escaping from the Soviets with his father, Amir becomes a happily married novelist in San Francisco. That's when he decides to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son, Sohrab (Ali Danish Bakhty Ari), from sexual servitude to a minion of the Taliban.

The flashback scenes of Baba and Amir fleeing the Soviet invasion boast a harrowing brute force. And Ershadi's Baba takes on stature from the moment he backs up his beliefs under Soviet guns and saves a married woman from rape. After that tense vignette, it's humiliating for us to see him in a servile position at a gas station and convenience store.

But Abdalla never develops a similar magnetism as the adult Amir, even when he weds a fetching Afghan refugee, Saroya (Atossa Leoni), and shuts up her big-shot former-general father when he voices old-country disdain for the Hazaras. As a grown-up, Amir turns into a vehicle for point-making and score-settling rather than a full-bodied character.

Staying faithful to a 371-page novel, the filmmakers inadvertently highlight its melodramatic underpinnings while pruning Hosseini's superb descriptions of Afghan and immigrant life. The Kite Runner is the second movie to open here that hinges on its protagonist trying to make amends for youthful sins. The first one, Atonement,worked out its anti-heroine's redemption in a way that reflected the chaos and injustice of real life, as well as the consolations of art. But in The Kite Runner, Amir's road to salvation is too neatly paved, and the pivotal action contains a central coincidence that's terrible in more ways than one. (The excesses are understanable: After all, The Kite Runner was Hosseini's first novel; Atonement was Ian McEwan's 11th.)

Ari's performance as Sohrab lifts the movie up even when the plot offers cheapjack catharses. His keen, subtle portrait of sexual mortification brings home the infuriating sadness of the worst child exploitation - and persuades you that a child can use his own innate outrage to surmount it, given the chance.

Director Forster always works wonders with children. It's what made Finding Neverland a near-classic. It's what redeems the intermittent obviousness and flatness of this film about escaping an unforgiving fatherland.

>>> The Kite Runner (Paramount Classics) Starring Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, Khalid Abdalla. Directed by Marc Forster. Rated PG-13. Time 127 minutes.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com