Post by StevePulaski on Oct 24, 2017 17:12:30 GMT -5
Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)
Directed by: Michael Carney
Directed by: Michael Carney
Deborah Hall (Renée Zellweger) serves a man nicknamed "Suicide" (Djimon Hounsou) in Same Kind of Different as Me.
Rating: ★★
Ron (looking around a kitchen in a homeless shelter): "Any infectious diseases floating around this place that I should know about?"
Cook (in reference to the homeless): "We try to infect them with love."
Cook (in reference to the homeless): "We try to infect them with love."
Same Kind of Different as Me has the worst title for a film I've seen since Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. You can have "Mandela." You can go for metaphorical with "Long Walk to Freedom." You can't and shouldn't have both. Michael Carney's Same Kind of Different as Me boasts a trite, maudlin title that emphasizes the distinctive while framing it awkwardly by juxtaposing two antonyms. Furthermore, it also seems hopelessly contrived, as if it's about a man finding out that someone who is homeless is capable of being a decent, moral human-being with a big heart after you get past his initially violent tendencies.
And that's exactly what it's about. The film is a Blind Side-esque redemption tale without the acting or narrative convictions of that film. Its saving grace is not the power of the Christian gospel or its acknowledgment of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but its occasional glimpses of human interest that undercut its more generic bits. It's easily the strongest Pure Flix or Christian effort of the year, but when you're going up against The Resurrection of Gavin Stone, All Saints, A Question of Faith, and the dreaded Slamma Jamma, that's not necessarily a selling point fit for a pull-quote.
Based on the bestselling memoir, which launched a followup (with a much better title) and a children's companion adaptation, the story concerns a wealthy Texas couple, Ron and Debbie (Greg Kinnear and Renée Zellweger), whose marriage is struggling as Ron's job as an art dealer has begun to overtake their marriage. One day, Debbie motivates (forces) Ron to help work with her at a food bank inside a local homeless shelter. It's there where they meet numerous kind but troubled souls, and eventually, a man who calls himself "Suicide" (Djimon Hounsou).
Evidently mentally unstable with some seriously violent tendencies, "Suicide" comes to introduce himself as Denver Moore to both Ron and Debbie, and proves to be a thoughtful, if troubled, man. He's been homeless ever since racists burned down his home, which resulted in the death of his grandmother, his only caregiver, and for almost his entire life, he's been, what Hall called in the title of his book "a modern day slave." Denver makes clear his deep distrust for white people when he initially converses with Ron; he says they view many of their friends, particular friends of color, like they do fish in a "catch and release" pond - an unexpectedly apt metaphor.
Ron, Debbie, and Denver bond as illness enters their life in a cruel and abrupt way, while the married couple juggle two kids (who are so prolifically present yet never say any lines of dialog) and responsibilities to the local shelter.
Same Kind of Different as Me is respectable with its level of human interest on Denver's side. The accounts he gives detailing his youth and experiences with racism are vivid and realized, and a moment where he unknowingly stumbles on some "shock art" of Klansmen at Ron's gallery sale triggers a particularly brutal memory. During these scenes, I thought the tides were turning for this year's batch of Christian films. Even Jon Voight's performance as Ron's alcoholic father had me pleasantly surprised. The humanity in these moments is rather genuine and Hounsou is the rock of the film that keeps it stable with a very good performance.
Whenever screenwriters Carney, Alexander Foard, and the real-life Ron Hall veer the story away from Denver, the film becomes rather flaccid. Ron and Debbie's family, even when overcome with the aforementioned illness, aren't very interesting, and Kinnear and Zellweger, whom I didn't even recognize until I reminded myself she was in the film, pack on performances that don't do much outside the basic constraints of hospitable Texans. The real life is Hounsou, and almost any time he's not on-screen, the film stagnates into a Lifetime drama with predictable emotions offset even more by a cloying score.
Same Kind of Different as Me is that kind of acceptable, mawkish entertainment that will inspire and uplift its target audience to recommend it to their friends and not much else. Films like this offer no solution to any kind of socioeconomic inequality and only very faint acknowledgment of it. They also do even less to answer the questions regarding why so many people are in Denver's morose situation and why people like Ron and Debbie are hard to come by despite being flawed themselves, or at least hindered by a tone that's self-congratulatory. In times of great racial and class divisions, films like Same Kind of Different as Me don't hurt but they do little to assert their significance outside of being another melodramatic weeper.
NOTE: Listen to my review of Same Kind of Different as Me on my radio show "Sleepless with Steve:"
Starring: Greg Kinnear, Renée Zellweger, Djimon Hounsou, Jon Voight, and Olivia Holt. Directed by: Michael Carney.