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Novels don’t come much more ambitious than John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a 600-page doorstopper, covering three generations of life in rural California. And so, any adaptation of the book must be commensurately grand in scope. It’s a perfect source, then, for a lush, thoughtful new Netflix mini-series, which can unfurl the tragedy of the Trask family, page by page.
Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott) and his half-brother Charles (Mike Faist) are raised by their stern tycoon father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts). While Adam is his father’s favourite, his service in the Civil War estranges the men and, when he returns, their family life is irrevocably altered. Enter Cathy (Florence Pugh), a young woman on the run from a violent past. “You’re so kind to me, and I’ll only bring you trouble,” she warns Adam. Soon enough she is pregnant with twins and Adam is relocating the family, against Cathy’s desires, to California. The move brings them to the sweeping plains of the Salinas Valley, into contact with Irish farmer Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds) and Chinese servant Lee (Hoon Lee, on superb form), and towards the disaster that will sweep them ever further away from Eden.
East of Eden is not simple material for an adaptation to grapple with. Written by Steinbeck in 1952 with the shadow of war in Europe still hanging over America, he re-staged the story of Adam and Eve, and their children Cain and Abel, against the backdrop of pastoral California. It was adapted for the big screen in 1955 by Elia Kazan, with Jo Van Fleet in an Oscar-winning role as Cathy, and James Dean starring as her son, Caleb. That movie is a classic but strained to compress Steinback’s intergenerational opus into a two-hour runtime, focusing only on the final third of the novel. Now, Kazan’s granddaughter, Zoe Kazan, is afforded the opportunity to develop the story over seven hour-long episodes, drawing out the subplots, lingering on the landscape, and lancing some of the boiling melodrama.
Because East of Eden is, in fact, an extremely overwrought story. Cathy Trask – or Kate Albey, as she later becomes – is a grotesquely malevolent force. “To a monster, the norm must seem monstrous,” she observes, bleakly. Kazan (the younger) increases the centrality of Cathy in the narrative, gives her a sympathetic backstory that excuses some of the character’s more incomprehensible flaws, but keeps her harshness. Pugh slides between the two sides of the character – the vulnerable sylph in need of rescue, and the wicked murderer removing all obstacles – with trademark elegance. She has the same star quality that Dean brought in 1955. Eyes that could pierce steel, a voice that could melt butter. Against her, Abbott (who has been an underrated TV actor since his turn on Girls) is the perfect embodiment of human weakness.
But even Pugh struggles with convincingly embodying a woman from early adulthood through 20 years where the weight of trauma and exploitation have borne down on her. At 30, she is 10 years younger than Van Fleet was in her iconic performance, and no amount of deftly applied make-up can quite convey Cathy’s hardships as the story inches to its conclusion. To counteract this structural flaw, the new series front-loads the action, focusing on Cathy and Adam. The adult versions of their twins, Aron and Caleb (played by Joe Anders and Joseph Zada), don’t appear until the penultimate episode, as the narrative rushes towards its denouement. Instead, more consideration is given to the character of Lee, who was cut from the film version by Kazan (the elder). “Being needed is hard bait for a lonely man,” he tells Adam. It draws some of the pathos away from the doomed Trask clan, towards those in their orbit.
It also helps the series feel modern. East of Eden is dominated by a sense of fatalism. Adam feels that his inheritance from his father is poisoned, and so he hands down that sin to his boys. All the characters feel unable to escape, even when they’ve run off to a whorehouse or enlisted in the army. “If I had a medicine that might save you but also might kill you, should I give it to you?” Hinds’ wise neighbour asks Adam. Alongside Lee – who introduces the concept of “timshel”, a Hebrew word meaning “you may triumph over sin” – these immigrants help to break the cycle. If America, too, is trapped in a doom loop, then it is up to the people to reclaim their autonomy.
Fundamentally, however, East of Eden is a reverent, traditional adaptation of one of America’s great novels. Zoe Kazan captures the grandeur of the tale and wrestles, largely successfully, with its unruly structure. This is slow, poetic television-making and Netflix should be applauded for resisting the temptation to turn Cathy into a Gothic succubus. It helps East of Eden feel urgent, a story rendered from myth, and a parable for our times.
