Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) Review

Zora Neale Hurston's lush, seamless 1937 novel, "Their Eyes Were Watching God," is especially not suited for the cruel commercial interruptions of broadcast television. Nonetheless, a movie based on the book, premiering this Sunday, March 6, at 9 P.M. on ABC, retains enough of Hurston's Southern magical realism, deep empathy for Black women and powerful love story to make this production a milestone for both Black film and television.

The movie is remarkable for its depiction of hot Black romance and sexuality. But it would be an understatement, as well as a cliché, to say that sparks fly between the movie's star, Halle Berry, and the last of her three husbands in the movie, played by Michael Ealy. These two can burn down the bed, and their chemistry is what makes the movie rise above the restrictions of its format and at least touch the level of Hurston's ebullient narrative.

"Their Eyes Were Watching God," rescued from out-of-print status during the 1970's flowering of the Black Studies movement, tells the story of Janie Crawford (Halle Berry), a Black girl who grows up poor in rural Western Florida but never gives up on the idea that life should be filled with deep, abiding love. Janie lives with Nanny (Ruby Dee), her grandmother, who, fearing that the teen-ager is starting to kiss boys, marries her off to an elderly farmer, Logan Killicks, who has "60 acres" of land, and therefore can offer his young wife a step up in life. A weepy Janie takes this step up, but then soon finds herself stepping out on the old man. She runs away and marries Joe Starks (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), who, in the story, becomes the mayor, principal landowner and businessman of Eatonville, Florida, the first African American town to be founded and incorporated the United States (and also Hurston's hometown.)

In her second marriage, Janie finds the higher social standing and wealth that Nanny always wanted for her. In the beginning she is showered with love, and then later, only showered with possessions. She realizes over the course of 20 years that she is also a possession. She is the mayor's trophy wife who is kept in her place—only a more highfalutin place. As fate would have it, life offers Janie yet another chance at love and a fuller definition of living. She meets Vergible "Tea Cake' Woods (Ealy), an migrant laborer, with a taste for gambling and liquor, who is much younger. Janie cannot pass up this chance to see if she can, at last, find a fulfilling love.

This is a quality production by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films. The settings, which appear to be on location, don't have that made-for-TV cheesiness. The cast, which also includes Terrence Howard, delivers believable performances that keep us in the Deep South during the first half of the 20th Century. Berry has to be given props for a topshelf performance, and so does Ealy and Santiago-Hudson. Berry has the starpower to draw audiences but she may be miscast as a woman described in the book as "very dark" and therefore defying the typical barriers of color discrimination within the Black community, especially during this time period. Also, Berry's stylists may have gone overboard with a long, wild hair weave that contrasts to the book's depiction of Janie's hair worn in a long, thick braid. 

Despite such troubling departures from the novel's fabric, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a worthy effort at adapting to the screen one of the great and classic American novels.