The View From the Inside.(Arts; Review)('The Kite Runner')(Movie review)

Byline: David Ansen

Forster's vivid film is unabashedly sentimental.

IF "Atonement" hadn't already been taken, Khaled Hosseini could have used it as a title for his novel "The Kite Runner," whose protagonist, a privileged 12-year-old Afghan boy named Amir, grievously betrays his childhood friend Hassan. Only years later, as an adult, will he be able to atone through an act of considerable courage.

Hosseini's novel, reputedly the first in English by an Afghan writer, became a surprise best seller. Director Marc Forster and screenwriter David Benioff have abbreviated Hosseini's tale but remained true to the book's heart-tugging, sentimental power and sturdy, symmetrical storytelling, as well as its some-times clumsy melodrama.

The story begins in San Francisco in 2001. The adult Amir (Khalid Abdalla) is now a novelist, having fled Afghanistan with his father after the Soviet invasion. He's a man haunted by his past, and Forster's movie soon transports us back to Kabul in 1978, before the city was decimated. The young Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) has grown up in the cultured home of his militantly anti-mullah father, Baba (the marvelous Homayoun Ershadi). They are Pashtun, and Hassan (sad-eyed Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada), the son of the family servant Ali, is of the Hazara tribe. The two friends may be servant and master, ...