I first read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden many years ago, but the sprawling, multigenerational tale of the Trasks continues to exert a profound influence on me. It was for this reason that I greeted Netflix’s announcement of a new adaptation with equal parts intrigue and apprehension. Netflix, after all, is not exactly renowned for treating period literature as holy writ (I was wholly prepared for a blossoming gay romance between Adam and Lee).
For those who haven’t read the novel, I envy your privilege of experiencing it for the first time (and encourage you to do so before reading this review or watching the adaptation). For everyone else, I won’t meander through the plot beyond the points pertinent to the adaptation’s triumphs and occasional shortcomings.
Screenwriter Zoe Kazan has largely succeeded in crafting a cohesive and remarkably faithful retelling of an unwieldy work. Any adaptation of East of Eden lives or dies by whether it preserves Steinbeck’s central preoccupation with good, evil, inheritance, and choice. Florence Pugh, therefore, inspired little confidence when, discussing Cathy Ames — one of literature’s great villains — she cheerfully explained that it was her job to make audiences “sympathize and maybe fall in love with her a little bit.”
Either Pugh has not seen her own performance, or Steinbeck proved more difficult to dislodge than expected. His introduction to Cathy — “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents” — persists in every icy stare. Kazan softens Cathy with calculated doses of sympathy, most conspicuously by allowing her to narrate portions of the story from her own perspective, while adding a punitive father and childhood trauma and removing some of her more gleeful admissions of cruelty. Yet Pugh never saps her of wickedness. She plays Cathy as equal parts beguilingly seductive and terrifying: beautiful, calculating, and barbarous.
The seven-episode format serves Steinbeck’s enormous canvas far better than a feature film could. Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation with James Dean remains a classic, but it concentrates largely on the novel’s final section. Here, the first half interweaves Adam and Charles Trask’s brutal upbringing under a father determined to raise soldiers with Cathy’s own origins, gradually bringing their parallel paths together when she arrives, battered nearly to death, at the brothers’ doorstep. Adam (Christopher Abbott, superbly cast alongside Mike Faist as Charles) promptly falls in love with her.
The irony is vicious. Adam pines for California’s untamed Eden and dreams of building “a home worthy of my wife,” while his wife is upstairs attempting a DIY abortion with a knitting needle. The series makes the extremity of Cathy’s self-destructive nihilism especially clear when the doctor tells her that her unborn children are perfectly healthy and that he intends to see them safely born. She wants them gone anyway. Cathy understands what people desire and turns those desires into weapons. Faye (played precisely as I imagined her by Martha Plimpton), her naive and loving employer, later in the story, effectively signs her own death certificate by putting Cathy in her will. Pugh stares at her with convincing daughterly affection while furtively poisoning her.
Kazan also cleverly draws repeated attention to Cathy’s relationship with alcohol. She abstains from imbibing, though not out of any health-obsessed zeal (like today’s Generation Z). Intoxication compromises her command of a room and threatens to expose the kindly façade she so carefully constructs.
She plainly derives no pleasure from champagne, sex, or money. Few villains can rival such unvarnished evil. Lady Macbeth craved power but went mad once the blood was spilled. Even Medea, in Euripides’ tragedy, murders her husband’s new bride and their children out of a broken heart and consuming vengeance. Cathy has no heart to break. It is all ultimately about control.
As the story passes into its second generation, the adaptation wisely gives greater weight to Steinbeck’s moral center. Ciaran Hinds makes a terrific Samuel Hamilton, while Hoon Lee is superb as Lee, Adam’s housekeeper, confidant, and the novel’s great wellspring of wisdom. Much of the sprawling Hamilton family has necessarily been pared away, but Lee survives with his philosophical importance intact.
A clever creative liberty also finds Cathy increasingly haunted by visions of Charles, whose apparition follows her descent into paranoia. The device works because Charles understood her before almost anyone else did. The two recognize something of themselves in each other. It also helps bridge Cathy’s story to the second-generation Cain-and-Abel struggle between Cal and Aron without absolving her of the destruction she leaves behind.
That struggle brings the adaptation to the idea upon which East of Eden ultimately rests: timshel — “thou mayest.” Cal, terrified that his mother’s nature lives inside him, confesses, “I have her in me.” Lee’s answer is the moral thesis of the story: “Whatever you do, it will be you who does it.” Lineage may burden a man. It does not make his choices for him.
NETFLIX REBOOTING LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE WITH ‘KALEIDOSCOPIC’ VISION
If the series has one conspicuous shortcoming, it is that Steinbeck’s profound adoration for the Salinas Valley never quite shines through. Adam repeatedly rhapsodizes about California and its climate, but the landscape itself lacks the almost biblical presence it assumes in the novel. There is something comically incongruous about this quintessentially Californian story being filmed in New Zealand. With contemporary California better known these days for taxation and bureaucracy than verdant fields, Steinbeck might reconsider sending the Joads west. Pugh’s American accent also slips occasionally, though such quibbles scarcely diminish an otherwise terrifying and tantalizing performance.
This is the essence of East of Eden, and the litmus test for any adaptation hoping to do justice to Steinbeck’s masterpiece. Zoe Kazan’s passes. Beneath the family betrayals, poisoned inheritances, jealous brothers, and biblical echoes lies an ode to individual agency and personal responsibility. Charles covets his father’s love for Adam. Cathy chooses depravity. Cal fears he has inherited the worst of those who came before him. Steinbeck gives them something harder and more liberating: choice. Thou mayest.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.