I just watched the movie version of the Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I loved the book when I read it the first time. Khaled Hosseini is a hauntingly beautiful writer and the story is absolutely heartbreaking. The subject matter of this book is not pretty and Hosseini doesn’t try to make it so. He showed the reader the good the bad and the ugly. He let you see that sometimes you have to risk the ugly to give someone else a little bit of the good. He also shows that sometimes being a witness is just as bad as being the wrongdoer. I did not cry when I read this book, I think there are some things that are too big to cry about. Sitting in my nice home in my free country without a real struggle to my name it just feels trivial to weep at what these people live in and with every day.
That said; this movie was good not great. This movie did not live up to the caliber of the book. I felt they left out pertinent information, such as the fact that Hassan had a cleft palate and Ali had a leg that was rendered useless from Polio. I felt these little additions to the story were what made the story what it was.
This story was not only about Amir’s betrayal of Hasaan but also about the class system that was in place in Afghanistan during this time. The children taunting Ali in the street because of his disability and ethnicity were major parts of setting the story for me. I missed these details in the movie.
The movie also left out Sohrab’s struggle with what was done to him, his attempted suicide and the struggle to get him out of Afghanistan. The movie jumped right from Amir rediscovering his faith to the men arriving in sunny California. Sohrab’s story was really not told, save for a 2 minute scene in a stairwell. This movie also did not tell the story of all the orphans left in Afghanistan because of the laws about adoption and the red tape involved in helping these children. Once again making the story solely about Amir and Hassan and not about Afghanistan and the struggles the country as a whole has had.
I did enjoy the movie, but am glad I also read the book. I highly recommend the book BEFORE the movie!
Rosy
