Book v. Movie

In most situations, I enjoy the book more then I ever enjoy the movie adaption of a novel. There are very few exceptions to this rule, and unfortunately The Kite Runner is not one of them. The first incongruence I noticed was with the casting of the movie. I do not know exactly what I was expecting for Rahim and Baba, but it definitely took me off guard when the movie presented its character interpretation. Rahim looked a tab bit sinister and Baba look weaker than I expected. I thought that he would look more like a force of nature.  For Hassan, the character was much too similar to Amir’s character. I think the reason people are so harsh towards the Hazara people is because they look different.  Hassan is described as having a flat nose and more narrow eyes. On the third page of the novel it actually says that “his almost perfectly round face, a face like a Chinese doll chiseled from hardwood.” This description suggests that Hassan looks more Asian then Afghani.  Also, and perhaps the most important flaw in Hassan’s character in the movie, is that he is without a cleft lip which completely throws off an entire section of the book. It reduces the suggestion of the importance of Hassan to Baba, because he is unable to give him the gift of the surgery. Also it takes away the symbolism at the end of book, where Hassan and Amir both have the scars in the same place on their upper lip.  The final character casting that I found to be completely dissimilar to the book was Assef. Assef is clearly described to have German descendants. He has blond hair and blue eyes, and he a bigger boy but the same age as Hassan because he mentions that they are in class together. Instead he is casted as a large, evil looking Afghani boy, clearly four or five years older than both Amir and Hassan. Which I suppose makes the character less appealing, but in terms of accuracy it is completely wrong.

My favorite parts of the novel are the small stories that detail the relationship between Hassan and Amir, Amir and Baba, Amir and Rahim, Amir and Soraya and Amir and Sorhob. Movies have limited time to relate the overall plot line of the story, and sometimes because of constraints in time and budget, things are cut from the novel. A lot of these small stories were cut from the movie, which I think weakens the audience’s understanding of the relationship between Amir and the people around him. Also because you are unable to hear the inner thoughts of Amir he looked a lot more redeemable in the movie than in the book. So, this made his quest to save Hassan’s son a little less surprising and out of character. Also there is less emphasis on Amir’s guilt and thus his “change” or character arc in the movie was less drastic. The movie skipped a whole 50 to 60 pages at the end of the book that I thought were significant. They skipped events like Sorhob’s attempted sucide and Amir and Sorhob’s trip to the hospital. They skipped the whole reason why Sohrob does not speak to Amir for an entire year. One positive thing about the movie was without being too graphic, the rape scene was just as horrid and hard to watch as it was to read in the novel.