It's an odd fate that Marc Forster's The Kite Runner suffers from the same quality that gives it strength. Based on Khaled Hosseini's bestselling--and brutal--novel, the film is both to its credit and detriment too gentle, its scenes so quiet and nuanced that it passes by with a grace that's easily forgotten.

A story of moral redemption, The Kite Runner opens in San Francisco, on novelist Amir (Khalid Abdalla) and wife Soraya (Atossa Leoni). Despite his success, Amir holds in himself an underbelly of sadness and guilt, and it's only at the beck of a phone call from his father's longtime friend Rahim Kahn (Shaun Toub) that he is forced finally to confront those feelings.

In a flash of a moment, Amir's back in 1970s Kabul, his boyish self (Zekeria Ebrahimi) walking alongside his servant and friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada). While young Amir is entirely of the mind, his focus based on thoughts and stories, Hassan is much more of the body, his inherent knowledge of kite running and his skill with a slingshot his greatest defenses in a world set against his status as one of the Hazara minority. Found after an exhaustive search by casting director Kate Dowd, acting newcomers Ebrahimi and Mahmidzada handle their heavy emotional moments perfectly, allowing the story to breath without manipulating its sadness. It's this same emotional hands-off technique, however, that works against the film in the first act's climatic moment, an act of violence committed against Hassan by Pashtun hotheads not nearly as unnerving here in film as on Hosseini's page. This kind-hearted--and quintessentially American commercial appealing--approach to violence later undercuts the true tragedy in the story between the two boys.

True to the novel's structure, after this opening section, the film unfolds in two additionally large content sections--the first a reprieve space set in San Francisco as Amir grows into adulthood and marries and the second Amir's unforgiving return to Afghanistan to correct his childhood misdeeds. While in the novel, this second section lulls at points, making itself less compelling than chronicle, screenwriter David Benioff and actors Abdalla and Homayoun Ershadi, playing Amir's father Baba, bring to its film equivalent a true and moving beauty. In simple, silent moments Abdalla conveys all the pathos of approaching loss just as Ershadi lives in a space of utter moral strength in the wake of old age and illness. Indeed, where the film overall falters, here it outshines its original, allowing for a humanity to surface stripped of sentimentality and rip with all the moments that give it universality.

As it wraps to a close in its final section, the film enters the bleak, its gentleness intact despite its view of a modern day Taliban-controlled Kabul. It's here Forster notably fails to make any memorable directorial decisions. The darkness and terror of the situation goes largely unexplored, and it feels as if the artistic choice, made in part to remain true to the book, is quite consciously done in order not to alienate a mainstream paying public. As Amir at last confronts his wrongs in the form of childhood Pashtun bully Assef (Abdul Salam Yusoufzai), he's beaten up in what frankly appears a sweet and survivable way. The gut-wrenching violence of the moment withdrawn, the confrontation feels predictable and more than a bit boring. Which leaves the true climatic moment of the film a subtle one, as Amir sits at the dinner table with his in-laws and confronts his father-in-law (Abdul Qadir Farookh), arguing, years too late, for the worth of his Hazara friend.

In its quietness and kindness, The Kite Runner is a one watch film, a truly brilliant adaptation of a novel although not a brilliant envisioning of a film.

For more information on the film visit www.thekiterunnermovie.com..

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