The Kite Runner

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale @TheCinemaSource.com

Adaptation is not an easy practice in the realm of screenwriting. A common misconception is that by taking already existing characters and plot, the process functions as easily as a paint-by-numbers job. Unfortunately, most casual film watchers fail to realize that most of their most cherished novels do not translate well on to the screen. How would one take the 480 pages of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, keep all of its content, and fit it into a screenplay of 120 pages? A good adaptation remains faithful to the themes and purposes of the source material, but does not necessarily always stay true to how the book is constructed.

Unfortunately, not all good adaptations make good films simply because not all novels contain well-developed stories. I have found in the more recent years that the film world has relied on adaptation more and more through comic books, video games, plays, novels, and even remakes. Eventually, with so much source material, we are bound to find some examples of weak choices for adaptation. A great example of this failure occurred with last year's The Da Vinci Code. Essentially an airport novel with some cool ideas about religious conspiracy, its story was hollow and its characters even more so. The film version, directed by Ron Howard, was derived from a screenplay that followed the majority of the book's plot scene by scene. The film was even worse than the book. This affirms my belief that if you take a piece of literature that has flaws, those problems will only be magnified in a visual text. For if novels are a guitar, the cinema is the amp we plug it into and all the wrong notes concealed by a more minute sonic environment now come blasting out of the speakers, penetrating our consciousness in a more glaring way.

That being said, I never read Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner nor am I at liberty to say that the issues I have with Marc Forster's film adaptation are due to the novel's contents. In reading about the book and by talking about it with those who have read the initial text, however, I have come to the conclusion that the film is the kind of adaptation that was not adapted all that much and probably should have been.

The story is broken up into three parts with the first taking place in 1970's Afghanistan. We follow two boys, Amir and Hassan, who are friends despite their different social status. Amir is a Pashtun boy, part of Kabul's upper class. Hassan is the son of Amir's servant and a Hazara. Their common bond is that they share a passion for kite fighting, a sport that demands competitors to knock their opponents flyer out of the sky. Amir is a gifted ...