Turning up the heat

If you have gone outside at all in the last few weeks, you have likely seen the peerless face of Halle Berry magnified manyfold, looking down at you from one billboard or another announcing the Oprah Winfrey-produced adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” airing Sunday on ABC.

First published in 1937, forgotten, and rediscovered in the ‘70s, the novel has multiple concerns. It is, among other things, an informed portrait of independent black life in Florida over the first few decades of the last century and a meditation on the importance of nature and native culture as opposed to material wealth and security. (Hurston was an anthropologist and folklorist as well as a novelist.) But it is freighted also with elements that would not be out of place in a Harlequin romance. The filmmakers -- director Darnell Martin and co-screenwriter Suzan-Lori Parks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Topdog/Underdog,” though also of Spike Lee’s “Girl 6” -- have done a serious job of adapting a book they obviously love; there is far less invented business than in most such adaptations. But in paring away most everything not strictly related to their protagonist’s protracted sentimental education, they’ve produced not much more than a glossy period chick-flick, a Lifetime movie with higher production values and an A-list lead.

It’s not quite fair to say that Berry’s distracting beauty deforms the film, since, as Hurston’s Janie, she’s playing a distracting beauty. (Hurston describes her “firm buttocks,” “pugnacious breasts” and “the great rope of black hair swinging to her waist and unraveling in the wind like a plume.”) But in the filmmakers’ awestruck regard for that beauty and the loving way they display it, they make it all about Halle. Most of the other characters are reduced to a portion of what they are on the page. They are mostly just stones in her road.

We meet Janie first as a budding teenager, a child of nature who, Hurston writes, “knew the words of the trees and the wind. She often spoke to falling seeds and said, ‘Ah hope you fall on soft ground.’ ” We see her running around in the woods and dipping into some remarkably clear streams, with little fishes darting among her flowing, floating locks -- a very pretty picture indeed, and as close as the film gets to catching the author’s (sometimes disturbingly) ecstatic tone.

One fine day, Janie sees some bees at work pollinating her favorite peach tree. Moments later, she’s kissing a boy, and moments after that she’s married off by her grandmother (Ruby Dee) to an old man with 60 acres and a mule but nothing to tickle a young girl’s fancy. Much of what follows details the quiet life of desperation she leads on a long detour to love. She runs off with Joe Starks (Ruben Santiago-Hudson, author of the play “Lackawanna Blues,” recently adapted by HBO), who becomes the driving force and first mayor of Eatonville, America’s first incorporated all-black community, and the real place where Hurston grew up (though the novel is certainly not autobiographical, except perhaps in a spiritual sense). But Starks turns out to be consumed by advancement and rank and possession, a corollary of which is that Janie is not allowed to have any fun at all. Fortunately, after about 20 years, he drops dead.

Not long after, Janie meets someone as beautiful and wild as herself -- Tea Cake (Michael Ealy), a rover many years her junior -- and true love finally arrives, along with its partner, good sex. (The filmmakers make a little more than the most of this.) Together they light out for the Everglades and a freewheeling community of migrant workers that as rendered here resembles nothing so much as the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert. A hurricane, which is more exciting on the page than on the screen -- given the small-screen budget, that’s no surprise -- arrives to disturb the harmony and propel the story to a dark climax but ultimately hopeful end.

Adaptation is always a difficult business, and the better and more literary the book, the more difficult it is. Hurston’s weird poetry and literary effects -- a sort of vernacular modernism -- don’t necessarily translate well to the screen, because, of course, they were never intended to.

*

‘Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God’

Where: ABC

When: 9-11 p.m. Sunday

Ratings: TV-14-S (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14, with an advisory for sex)

Halle Berry...Janie Crawford

Ruben Santiago-Hudson...Joe Starks

Michael Ealy...Tea Cake

Terrence Howard...Amos Hicks

Lorraine Toussaint...Pearl Stone

Nicki Micheaux...Phoebe Watson

Mel Winkler...Logan Killicks

Ruby Dee...Nanny

Executive producers Oprah Winfrey, Kate Forte. Director Darnell Martin. Writers Suzan-Lori Parks, Misan Sagay, Bobby Smith Jr.