Afghan Story
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Afghan Story A nation’s agony in the saga of two boys. BY JOHN PODHORETZ The Kite Runner Directed by Marc Forster The Kite Runner is enormously affecting, but it’s not very good. This makes...
...The movie’s superb screenwriter, David Benioff, has expertly streamlined Hosseini’s sprawling and episodic novel into a tight two-hour fi lm, and in doing so, actually improves on the original...
...A woman accused of adultery is brought to a soccer stadium and stoned to death during halftime, with the fi rst stone hurled by a young Talib with a thick beard and wildly incongruous Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses with mirrored lenses...
...In seeking his redemption, Amir is also trying to live up to the example set by his own father, Baba...
...The character of Baba is especially welcome in the Year of the Anti-Immigrant because The Kite Runner offers a brief but telling look at the hard-working Afghans who found a home in the United States after the Soviet takeover...
...The Afghans we see here make their way in the new world without complaint and with great pride at their ability to adapt...
...Baba is reduced to working at a gas station during the week and selling junk at a fl ea market on weekends...
...The Taliban’s tortures stand in marked contrast to the freedom represented by the kites that blanket the sky over Kabul in the movie’s opening scenes, and make an appearance again at its conclusion, testifying to the indomitability of the Afghan spirit...
...It provides an easily digestible guide to one of the world’s most unfortunately important places with the intent of branding its troubles on the popular imagination, and it succeeds brilliantly...
...I’ll take a thousand of his bullets before I’ll let this indecency take place,” Baba says, and is only saved from death when the soldier’s superior arrives and tells the would-be rapist to let the truck pass...
...It is a depiction of rack and ruin, with streets covered in rubble, orphanages with no heat or electricity, corpses subjected to public hanging still dangling from nooses days later...
...Hosseini compresses Afghanistan’s suffering into the experience of two Afghan boys, one a high-born Pashtun named Amir and the other a lowly Hazara named Hassan, who are nine years old when the story begins in the mid-1970s...
...Amir’s lonely guilt toward Hassan haunts him throughout his adulthood until a twist of fate affords him a chance at clearing his conscience...
...The servant boy is brave and noble and the highborn boy is cowardly and selfi sh...
...Forster takes a scene directly out of the book in which a boy is forced to act like a dancing monkey and turns it into a moment of almost unbearably sickening power...
...And when the high-born boy commits a guilt-ridden offense against his inferior friend, he must contend with the shame and sorrow of his betrayal...
...The fl ea market is populated with other Afghan exiles, including a former general whom Amir must court with some sycophancy to win his beautiful daughter’s hand...
...On their diffi - cult trek out of Afghanistan in the back of a truck following the Soviet invasion, Baba shows his heroic mettle by confronting a Soviet soldier who will only allow their truck to pass if he is allowed to rape a woman riding with them...
...The movie, like the book, milks to great effect the primal anxiety that comes from showing torments and trials visited on little boys, whose effort to assume a manly stiff upper lip in the face of abuse only points out how small and defenseless they actually are...
...This makes it a perfect cinematic adaptation of the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini about Afghanistan...
...In this respect, The Kite Runner is a companion piece to The Namesake, the wonderful and heart-rending portrait of an Indian family living in America that was released earlier this year...
...But all this is secondary to the movie’s central achievement: its portrait of Afghanistan’s late 20th-century descent into Hell...
...Both Hosseini and the movie’s director, Marc Forster, display a brutally effective Dickensian ghoulishness in this regard...
...It’s a terrifi c scene (though not a believable one) acted to perfection by Homayon Ershadi, an Iranian who, if there is any justice, will win an Academy Award for his performance...
...And yet somehow, in both its forms, The Kite Runner is basically beyond criticism...
...They are close friends, but, as is true of their fathers, they are also master and servant...
...The true purpose of The Kite Runner is didactic, and nobly so...
...One leaves the theater spent and overwhelmed...
...But like its literary progenitor, it’s something very memorable—almost in spite of itself...
...Still, as both novel and movie, The Kite Runner is a lumpy melodrama with too-good-to-be-true characters and wildly implausible plot twists that strain even minimal credulity...
...John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s movie critic...
...The sequences set in Afghanistan under Taliban rule hit the viewer with the force of a nightmare...
...These aren’t necessarily the most pleasant of emotions, and the fi lm that generates them is not a work of art...
...The Kite Runner is an effective reminder of the world-changing nature of the Soviet invasion in 1979, of the moral and practical value of the removal of the Taliban from power in 2001, and a message to Afghans themselves about why their tribal rivalries are foolish, disastrous, and immoral...
...To do so, Amir, now an American citizen living in Silicon Valley, must sneak back to Afghanistan in disguise during the height of Taliban rule...
Vol. 13 • December 2007 • No. 14
