Same Kind of Different as Me

The cast alone makes this worth watching: Greg Kinnear, Renée Zellweger, Djimon Hounsou, and Jon Voight. Hounsou is the standout as Denver Moore, a man whose life story — modern-day slavery on a Louisiana plantation — sounds like historical fiction but happened within living memory. He brings a fierce dignity to a character who could have been reduced to a redemption prop. Kinnear plays the wealthy art dealer Ron Hall with his trademark mix of charm and discomfort, and Zellweger as Debbie Hall (whose vision drives the story) is understated and effective. The film's challenge is that the real story is almost too remarkable to believe: a homeless man who was essentially enslaved as a sharecropper meets an art dealer at a soup kitchen, and they become best friends. The film handles this with more gravity than sentimentality, though it occasionally tips toward the latter. The 'white savior' criticism that applies to many similar stories is somewhat mitigated by the film's insistence that Denver changes the Halls as much as they change him. Imperfect but genuinely moving.