The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner is about anal rape in the Middle East, though most of the film's sequences are computer generated kite battles. It has two climactic scenes involving a ten year old dramatically pointing a slingshot at a bully, and one scene of a woman being stoned to death. Somehow, The Kite Runner is able to blindly switch between these disparate modes of ludicrous fantasy and "real, tough issues" as if the pieces are mere short stories with a related setting.

The story involves two young Afghan kids who are best friends; one, named Amir, witnesses the other, Hassan, being raped right after Amir wins the annual kite flying contest, but he is too chicken to stop it, or tell anyone about it. Eventually Amir's father must flee to America, and Amir's betrayal of Hassan is never rectified...until 20 years later, when he receives a fateful phone call from an old friend who says Hassan is dead, but he has a son, who is being raped right this very instant. Amir is told in no uncertain terms that saving Hassan's son, hidden deep in Taliban occupied Afghanistan, is his chance to make things right.

The film that follows is pandering, pathetically sentimental, and aesthetically barren. It appeals to the base instincts of easy-multiculturalism by providing ethnic actors in a homogenized, Western-friendly plot with a pleasant ending (the movie is directed by a Swiss immigrant to America). The story, with all its political overtones about Russia and the Taliban and its centerpiece gay rape scene, aspires to be a gritty Middle Eastern saga, while the filmmakers treat the material like a PG-13 bedside fable, where any ten year old kid can get over the horrors of being a sex slave. Rape itself is only barely discussed, and the sole scene where it is depicted was apparently edited by the MPAA themselves. More time is devoted to the computer generated kite flying, but I guess even the Afghanis prefer to look on the bright (fake) side of life. Despite the film's hands-over-the-eyes approach towards sexual abuse, the government of Afghanistan banned the film for what little rape it did show. The young Afghan boy who played Hassan has even expressed discomfort about going outside, for fear that people will assume he was actually raped. If the filmmakers are trying to speak to (and maybe undo) the homophobia of radical Islam, they're wasting their time.

The Kite Runner's only redeeming moments are of Amir and his father integrating into the more permissive American culture, but even these scenes are written in movie-character shorthand and much more worthy films have handled similar material. However, it wouldn't matter if these scenes were beautifully written as I can hardly get over the movie's offensive morality, where one mistake can be forgiven by performing an unrelated good deed. Because Amir puts himself into danger, traveling through Afghanistan without a beard (a dangerous offense to the Taliban), all for Hassan's son, surely he deserves atonement, the movie says; but would the action of saving an abused boy have seriously meant less if the boy was being held next door in his skyrise apartment? Does saving a life, no matter how difficult it is to do, truly negate ruining a different one? This tit-for-tat morality, whether it demands good deeds or suicide bombs, is what's destroying the Middle East.

The management at The Varsity Theatre in Ashland told me that The Kite Runner was selling out at almost every showing. To me, that's just as culturally damning as Tinseltown in Medford showing three prints of Alvin and the Chipmunks.