Following in the footsteps of his father, Amir becomes a kite fighting champion along with Hassan. Once the competition is decided, Hassan uses his kite running skills to track down the kite the two defeated to win the championship. When he recovers the kite, the bully Assef reappears and changes the boys' lives forever. When Hassan refuses to surrender the kite to the bully, Assef and his gang track down Hassan, and brutally rape him. Though Amir arrives in time to see the attack taking place, he does nothing to stop it. From then on, Amir is no longer able to face his friend. Whether from guilt or shame, both boys can no longer communicate with each other. Eventually, Amir plants evidence to make Hassan seem like a thief. Hassan, despite his innocence, confesses. Though Baba forgives him, Ali insists they must leave Baba's employment immediately, despite forty years of loyal service.
The film opens with the modern day Amir in Los Angeles (circa 2000), opening a box full of copies of his new novel. He receives a telephone call from his father's friend Rahim Khan: "You should come home. There is a way to be good again." The tagline of The Kite Runner, "there is a way to be good again," is critical to the entire story; what follows after the phone call is a chain of events that leads to Amir trying to heal the wounds of the past.
It's hard to call The Kite Runner, with its message of atonement, an enjoyable film. It tackles some very tough issues on a very personal level. I found it difficult to excuse Amir's betrayal of Hassan so many years earlier. Given the current state of Afghanistan, The Kite Runner provides an education to the unfamiliar about the country before the Russian invasion and the rise of the Taliban. The film stands as a reminder of the beauty of the now war-torn nation.
Working from Khaled Hosseini's novel, screenwriter David Benioff and director Marc Forster have done a remarkable job crafting a story not in their native tongue. Though much of The Kite Runner is in English, many of the subtitled scenes are in Dari, an Afghan dialect of Farsi, or Persian. Forster required a translator to work with several actors who couldn't speak English. The acting in The Kite Runner is superb. The actors playing the young Amir and Hassan are incredibly talented. Both of them give emotionally powerful performances that lend to the gravity of the story being told.
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