Reviews

Films

The Kite Runner

Directed by Marc Forster; starring Shaun Toub, Khalid Abdalla, Nasser Memarzia, Said Taghmaoui

Ian McEwan's Atonement and this year's film version of it inevitably come to mind when reading the Afghan-American Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner, or seeing Marc Forster's film.

Here again we have the story of a young person bearing false witness against a lower-class friend and, with a background of war, carrying that guilt throughout life, becoming a writer and seeking redemption. To this is added one of the most painful experiences of our time and a major theme of modern literature: exile and cultural displacement.

In this case, Amir, the son of a wealthy Kabul liberal, does nothing when his closest friend Hassan, son of the family servant, is sodomized by sadistic young bullies. Projecting his guilt upon the victim, he frames his saintly, long-suffering friend for robbery.

The Russians invade a year later, Amir and his father go into American exile, Hassan and his father stay at home to endure the war and the subsequent rise of the Taliban. Amir's new life as both an American and a member of a Californian Afghan community is nicely established. But it is challenged in 2000 when an urgent message draws him back to Kabul via Pakistan to fulfil family obligations and find atonement.

The rituals of competitive kite flying are a metaphor, as the picture moves satisfyingly from meditation on exile to search-and-rescue thriller. It's deeply moving, though over-emphatic and lacking variation in pace. But there are some unforgettable scenes (most remarkably the stoning to death of a woman adulterer by Taliban thugs under the instruction of a hypocritical mullah at half-time during a football match) and it introduces us to a world beyond the TV news.

I Am Legend

Directed by Francis Lawrence; starring Will Smith, Gabriel Union, Alice Braga, Salli Richardson

The surprise current box-office success in the United States, far more popular than the seasonal blockbusters, is I Am Legend, an apocalyptic SF flick based on a 1954 pulp novel by Richard Matheson (author of The Shrinking Man and Duel), previously filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964) starring Vincent Price, and The Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston.

The film kicks off with a marvelously complacent British scientist with the choice name of Dr Krippen (an uncredited Emma Thompson) speaking on TV about her miraculous cure for cancer. There is, however, a side-effect: a deadly virus carried in the air and by physical contact among humans has produced a worldwide pandemic resulting in death for the lucky ones or, for the less fortunate, a transformation into super-active cannibalistic zombies who only walk by night.

Will Smith plays scientist Robert Neville, the only sentient being left in New York, living in an opulent brownstone house on Washington Square with his dog Samantha while working in the basement on a cure for this plague.

The vision of a Manhattan filled with abandoned cars, its bridges shattered, lions chasing deer down Fifth Avenue, Times Square overgrown with bushes, is poetically realized by production designer Naomi Shohan and probably accounted for a large part of the fabulous budget.

Smith, alone with his dog for much of the time, commands our attention as the resourceful Crusoe figure, and there are some good action setpieces as Neville does battle with the ghastly mutants. But despite a tagged-on happy ending, this is a deeply depressing experience as no doubt Matheson intended it to be back in the angst-ridden 1950s.

The Guardian

(China Daily 12/27/2007 page20)