Last night, after they let me out of the courthouse, I went over to the Hearst building, where editorial director Ellen Levine was hosting an advance screening of The Kite Runner in the company theater. I’d never read the novel, so various Hearst publicists and editors warned me to expect a tearjerker—but, honestly, it didn’t feel any more emotionally manipulative than your average Hollywood melodrama. If anybody still cares what the Taliban thinks about anything, they’re not exactly going to be thrilled at being depicted as racist pederasts, but apart from an earnest speech here and there, the emotional arcs aren’t too terribly heavyhanded.
(At least not for American audiences; in Afghanistan, the family of the child actor who plays the rape victim fears the movie will bring him shame, alleging that producers told them the scene would be cut—which, if it had happened, would’ve rendered the film pretty meaningless. As it is, the version of that scene shown last night was muted but clear in its implications. Still, according to the boy’s father, “the people of Afghanistan do not understand that it’s only acting or playing a role in a film. They think it has actually happened.” Never mind that this strikes me as the sort of thing that would get a Westerner branded an imperialist bigot for saying; the tail end of the AP suggests the family may have an ulterior motive for kicking up a fuss…like maybe a ticket out of Afghanistan.)
Anyway, as far as my impressions went, David Benioff is pretty much guaranteed a spot on the Academy Awards’ best adapted screenplay shortlist, while Khalid Abdalla could earn a best actor nomination on merit, depending on how crowded the competition gets over the next few months. The box office prospects are a little trickier; it’s one thing for American readers to embrace a novel set in pre-invasion and Taliban-era Aghanistan, and another for American moviegoers to embrace a film where more than half the dialogue is in an Afghan dialect of Persian. But I think it’ll do okay.