TV MOVIE DOESN'T BRING NOVEL TO LIFE.Byline: - David Kronke 'OPRAH WINFREY Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God'' proves that even considerable talent - producer Winfrey, star Halle Berry and screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks (whose play ``Topdog/Underdog'' won the Pulitzer Prize) - can be stymied when attempting to adapt a book (by Zora Neale Hurston Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance, best known for the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. ) beloved for its lyrical writing. Berry stars as Janie Crawford, an assertive young African-American woman by 1920s standards, and her peripatetic search for love. She abandons her first, arranged marriage for the smooth-talking Joe Starks (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), who helps build a small but vibrant all-black Southern town. It's all good until Joe declares before the town that Janie ``don't know Don't know (DK, DKed) "Don't know the trade." A Street expression used whenever one party lacks knowledge of a trade or receives conflicting instructions from the other party. nothin' about no speech-making; that's not why I married here.'' Just like that, you see the flicker go out of Berry's eyes. Janie's relationships are good - up until the second they're not. Then her intermittent narration kicks in: ``Twenty years TWENTY YEARS. The lapse of twenty years raises a presumption of certain facts, and after such a time, the party against whom the presumption has been raised, will be required to prove a negative to establish his rights. 2. passed.'' This is where ``Their Eyes Were Watching God'' betrays its slightly programmatic nature: It offers no clue as to how they've endured that long, it just plops us down to check out the end of the relationship. Enter, on cue, the sweaty, insouciant in·sou·ci·ant adj. Marked by blithe unconcern; nonchalant. [French : in-, not (from Old French; see in-1) + souciant, present participle of soucier, Tea Cake (Michael Ealy); Berry's hungry look telegraphs so much they could've just cut directly to the scene of the two in bed. Once they do get there, there's not even one bit of dramaturgy dram·a·tur·gy n. The art of the theater, especially the writing of plays. dram  a·tur separating Janie and Teacake's lovemaking love·mak·ing n. 1. Sexual activity, especially sexual intercourse. 2. Courtship; wooing. lovemaking Noun 1. interlude from the souring of the relationship. (In the book, Tea Cake was a dark-skinned black romancing the lighter-skinned Janie, which commented on the era's social underpinnings in a way the film ignores.) Hurston's career was a tragic one with a posthumous coda - she slipped from the pinnacle of the Harlem renaissance of the 1930s to laboring as a hotel maid in the 1950s, dying in obscurity until Alice Walker revived interest in her work in the '70s. ``Watching God'' is considered by some one of the most poetic American novels, but even with narration, a filmmaker is not going to get much of that in a movie. Hurston's line, ``They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God,'' was a description of a moment of romantic perfection that a movie is hard-pressed to convey as eloquently, so here it's passed off as pallid pal·lid adj. 1. Having an abnormally pale or wan complexion: the pallid face of the invalid. 2. Lacking intensity of color or luminousness. 3. uplift. OPRAH WINFREY PRESENTS: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD - Two and one half stars What: The adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston, starring Halle Berry. Where: ABC ABC in full American Broadcasting Co. Major U.S. television network. It began when the expanding national radio network NBC split into the separate Red and Blue networks in 1928. (Channel 7). When: 9 tonight. In a nutshell: Can't match the novel. |
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