Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005) – DVD

**½/**** Image A Sound A-
starring Halle Berry, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Ealy, Terrence Howard
screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks and Bobby Smith, Jr., based on the novel by Zora Neale Hurston
directed by Darnell Martin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Their Eyes Were Watching God is so much better than it had to be that you wish it were better than it actually is. There's nothing slapdash or careless about its rendering of Zora Neale Hurston's famous novel–clearly, the book meant enough to executive producer Oprah Winfrey that she and her creative team tried to pull out all the stops. Alas, it's professional and pleasant but never actually hits any high notes, forming a straight-line narrative without many stylistic digressions or visual curlicues. After a while, you want a little more from it than the best that small-screen discipline can provide. Still, it's not slapped-together or careless, and it manages to hold your attention fervently enough to pass the time, if not astound you.

The trade-off of Their Eyes Were Watching God is sort of the one you get with Winfrey's program (and talk-TV in general): a total confinement to a subject definition that's at once entirely sincere and uncomfortably rigid. Thus Hurston's protagonist Janie Crawford (Halle Berry) seems the stereotypical female "free spirit," disapproved of by her grandmother (Ruby Dee), married off to a much older man (Mel Winkler) she rejects, finding love and then a possessive bully in Joe Starks (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), and then, following the death of that second husband twenty years down the road, getting it right in the arms of the much younger Tea Cake (Michael Ealy). Her trajectory rubs shoulders with a variety of environments (the first incorporated black town in America; a group of mixed-race fruit pickers), but there's little time for any sense beyond her own identity.

Of course, a straight-up movie-movie starring the sparkling Berry and directed with pleasant care is not nothing. Although he's not into shattering your consciousness, director Darnell Martin is a cut above the TV-movie pack, quiet and sensitive and really, really creative when it comes to shooting kisses. The acting is uniformly solid, while the casting appears to match the characters rather than the vicarious fantasies that dominate TV and cable films. You don't feel insulted by the movie, even though you're not particularly challenged by its structure: it's trying, in its limited way, to express the beating down of an indomitable will that won't stay down. But its glimpse of thematic gold only makes you impatient for more; by the end you feel ever so slightly let down.

Left unanswered by the film is how Janie fits into the social scene. The world surrounding her is sketched in the most general terms–upon fleeing with Tea Cake to pick cucumbers, she finds herself in a place of complex interrelationships that are barely drawn. I can't vouch for whether Hurston handled it better, but its proximity to the pitfalls of TV "quality" is too close for comfort. There's the sense that the supporting townspeople and villagers are merely well-upholstered backdrop for the protagonist's adventures. Everything has been so distilled to the dregs of narrative that it becomes slightly suspect, placing a ceiling on the considerable pleasures that a well-meaning adaptation has to offer.

THE DVD
The full-frame image on Buena Vista's DVD release of Their Eyes Were Watching God is remarkably sharp and vivid, with just a hint of oversaturation keeping it from scoring absolute top marks. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is also good, an uncomplicated mix that nevertheless offers throbbing subwoofer action on Terence Blanchard's sparingly-used score. There are no extras outside of trailers for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Alias: Season 4, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Home Improvement: Third Season, Golden Girls: Third Season, Scrubs: Season 3, Desperate Housewives, and a "TV on DVD" spot.

113 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 5.1; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Buena Vista