Marc Forster’s film of Khaled Hosseini’s novel is at its best when it is two boys and a kite over Kabul, and the young actors carry it. Once Amir grows up, the script starts explaining, the score starts insisting, and the film gets smaller.
Marc Forster, who made Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, has filmed Khaled Hosseini’s novel about a Kabul boy who betrays his friend and spends the rest of his life owing him. The book sold in millions, and the film, adapted by David Benioff, treats it with care: the Kabul scenes are played in Dari with subtitles, which a studio film of this size did not have to do. The result is a decent, often affecting picture with an hour of something better inside it. The hour is the childhood, and it is the children who make it.
Zekeria Ebrahimi plays young Amir as a boy who already knows he is a coward and hopes nobody else has noticed. Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada’s Hassan is the more remarkable performance: open, loyal, quick to smile, with a stillness when he is hurt that a trained adult actor would struggle to find. The two of them read under a pomegranate tree, squabble over a story Amir has written, and run through the lanes of old Kabul as if the camera were not there. Homayoun Ershadi gives Baba the weight the part needs, a big man who loves his son and cannot hide that he wishes he were a different boy. Every scene between the two is a small negotiation, and Amir loses all of them.
The kite tournament is the sequence people will remember and it deserves to be. Roberto Schaefer shoots the city from the rooftops in dust and low winter light, and Matt Chessé cuts between the boys’ hands on the string, the crowds on the roofs and the kites themselves, which were plainly finished with computers and swoop with a freedom real kites do not have. It does not matter. We were as caught up as the boys were, leaning towards the screen, and when the last kite fell we felt the small, foolish rush of having won something. What happens in the alley afterwards is handled with restraint, mostly off camera and on the faces, and it is the last time the film trusts us to work something out for ourselves.
Then the Soviets come, the family flees, and the film moves to California and to Khalid Abdalla as the adult Amir. Abdalla is intelligent and watchful and has little to play: a man who writes novels, marries Soraya (Atossa Leoni) and waits for the plot to telephone. The call comes from Rahim Kahn (Shaun Toub), and the second half takes Amir back to a Taliban-run Afghanistan on an errand we will not describe. Benioff’s script, which compressed the childhood so neatly, now starts stating things. Characters tell each other what they are feeling and why it matters. Alberto Iglesias’s score, which had been gentle under the kites, a reed flute and strings, comes forward and underlines each revelation. By the final half hour it is telling us when to cry, which is the surest way to stop us.
The return to Kabul is also where the film’s judgement goes. Saïd Taghmaoui is good as Farid, the driver who dislikes Amir on sight and says so, and the bleached, flat way Schaefer shoots the ruined city is a real contrast to the amber of the childhood. But the villains are only villains, the coincidences arrive on cue, and a book that was careful about class and guilt becomes a film about a brave man rescuing someone. We felt handled, and we resented it, because the first hour had shown us Forster did not need to do this.
Set against Forster’s earlier films, this is nearer Finding Neverland than Monster’s Ball: handsome, well acted and too sure of what it wants us to feel. Set against the novel, it follows the events closely. Hosseini’s Amir despised himself on every page; the film’s Amir mostly looks sad, which is not the same thing.
See it for the boys, for Ershadi, and for ten minutes of kites over Kabul that we have not forgotten. Watch it at home, where the second half’s insistence is easier to bear and the subtitles easier to read. It runs 128 minutes and carries a 12A, which given what happens in that alley is about as low as it could go.
