Review of "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

Have you ever seen Oprah's "O" magazine? Each issue contains a number of wonderful interviews, ideas and insights--but they are buried in a sea of glossy advertising. It would be a much better magazine if you didn't have to leaf through all that materialistic fodder to get to the good stuff. The same problem plagues Oprah's adaptation of "Their Eyes Were Watching God." Perhaps TV is not the right medium for serious film. If all that commercial time had been spent on character development, it would have been a much better retelling of Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece.

To be sure, there were many good things about the movie. The cast was superb. Halle Berry was a perfect choice for the role of Janie Starks. Michael Ealy was superb as Tea Cake. It was a treat to see Ruby Dee as Janie's grandmother, among an excellent supporting cast. The town of Eatonville, Florida was faithfully rendered and beautifully filmed. I don't know where they found the gorgeous tropical pool Janie floated in, but I want to go there! Suzan Lori-Parks's screenplay preserved much of Hurston's wonderful dialogue, dialect intact. The 1920s-1930s costumes--especially Janey's lovely blue dress--were very well done.

The main problem was a lack of detail. While many of the important scenes in the book made it to the screen, some key scenes were missing. The dialogues between Janie and her grandmother should have been presented in their entirety (instead of commercials!); how unfortunate that Dee and Berry weren't given the opportunity to act out this passage. One of my favorite visuals in the book was also missing: Janie's split-second decision to leave her husband for Joe Starks--literally leaving breakfast sizzling on the stove, tearing off her apron as she heads down the road to meet him, picking flowers while she waits for his carriage. And what about those spontaneous parties at Janie and Tea Cake's shack in the muck, Janie cooking food for everybody, Tea Cake playing his guitar. No guitar in this story. Janie's murder trial didn't make it to the screen either, nor the flamboyant and somber funeral procession for Tea Cake, the grief-stricken widow still in her overalls.

Character development was virtually non-existent. The rich minor characters who inhabit Hurston's book were all sort of glommed together, more like extras than actors given a chance to do their stuff. You didn't even know most of their names. This was particularly true in the muck segment of the story, when Janie and Tea Cake seemed isolated from the community of bean-pickers. In the book they were the center of a lively, close-knit community of colorful characters. This omission was a real error in a story that is rooted in a sense of community.

While on the subject of character development, Janie herself was presented as a fully-developed character from the start. She didn't seem to go through all the trials of self-discovery she experienced in the novel. Her confrontation with Joe Starks on his deathbed--a pivotal moment in the novel--was tepid and unconvincing. The complexity of their relationship, and its effect on Janie's growth as a person, was simply glossed over. The filmmakers seemed intent on portraying Joe as a regular guy, and not the overbearing patriarch of the novel.

By far the worst departure from Hurston's original was the key scene where Tea Cake "steals" Janie's money. In the movie he confesses to losing it all through gambling. But in the book, he returned all of Janie's seed money, which he had successfully gambled into an even larger amount. So what is this, gambling is not PC, so we have to change the plot? This was an important moment in their relationship, when Janie realized she could trust Tea Cake, and he proved that he could support them through his own frankly unconventional efforts. They were equals, Tea Cake didn't have to live on Janie's money. For whatever reasons, the moviemakers really botched that scene.

On the plus side, at least "Their Eyes Were Watching God" has become a part of American popular culture. But it is worthy of a more serious effort that puts more trust in Hurston's marvelous story. I await the Merchant Ivory version.