After reading the book, I watched the film. What a disappointment the film was. The filmmakers have taken a book that explores the differences between women and men as well as issues of race, prejudice and class difference, and turned it into little more than a formulaic romance novel. I note that most of the reviewers who rated the film highly had not read the book. I encourage you to do so. It is such a rich novel--far richer than the film. What the screenwriter has done is purge the movie of all the more difficult issues the book deals with. Gone is Mrs. Turner's discussion of race and her prejudice against darker-skinned people. Gone is Janie's jealousy as well as the explanation for Tea Cake's violence (of course, Tea Cake's violence is gone, too, because he's supposed to be the romantic hero; romantic heroes can't hit their wives as Tea Cake does in the book). Gone are the conversations on the porch of Joe Starks store. Gone is Nanny's explanation of her reasoning for Janie's marriage to Logan Killicks. It's really too bad that the production company didn't have faith in Zora Neale Hurston's story and felt they had to over-simplify it; I'm sure the audience could have handled it in all its complexity.