Which is a long, and, I admit, somewhat mean way of saying that I was surprised by her performance in ''Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God." As Janie Crawford in ABC's adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 classic, she finally seems to relax and give in to a role. Too often, as if to compensate for her looks, Berry hasn't acted so much as she has strained to ''act." But in this TV movie, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channel 5, she forgets all about trying to appear substantial and complex, she forgets about trying at all. She submerges herself in the moment of an early 20th-century black woman living for the Now, a dreamer moving from man to man and hope to hope in a long journey to selfhood.
A Southern girl, Berry's Janie is a sort of primitive flower child, letting caterpillars crawl on her face and telling us in a voice-over, ''I was born sort of knowing things, like how the trees and the wind talk." Her grandmother, Nanny (Ruby Dee), makes her marry a dull, older farmer, urging her to forget about love and accept her good fortune as a black woman with acreage. But Janie is a yearning soul, unwilling to dampen her need for romance and sexual satisfaction. She's always looking upward, drifting in the crystalline waters near her home, undergoing rebirth in those baptismal cleansings. Later in her life, during the movie's only action sequences, water will usher in her most dramatic change.
Naturally, much of Hurston's poetry is missing from the movie and its voice-over, even her title has been compromised by the ''Oprah Winfrey Presents" promotional moniker. But while ''Their Eyes Were Watching God" is inevitably TV-movie deep, director Darnell Martin still manages to fit it with an evocative atmosphere and some lovely cinematic flourishes you don't expect to find in such a mainstream product. And while screenwriters Suzan-Lori Parks, Misan Sagay, and Bobby Smith Jr. have condensed Hurston's story and language, they've done so without cramming in material. Running at 2½ hours, the pace is slow and sure, as Janie submits to her reveries, or as her impatience builds before driving her to action.
