John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel “East of Eden”, featured in Oprah’s Book Club Pick in 2003, is a retelling, or actually two retellings, of the Cain and Abel story; First in Connecticut with half-brothers Charles and Adam Trask, then in the author’s hometown of the Salinas Valley, along with Adam’s fraternal twins Cal and Aron, they compete for their father’s affection. If you haven’t guessed it from the title yet, Steinbeck, not wanting you to miss its meaning, has a character read the entire passage from Genesis.
The stories, dating from the late 19th century to World War I, connect with a woman named Cathy Ames, whom Adam married and who gave birth to Cal and Aron; I guess that makes her the Eve of this house, but that’s not a theological path Steinbeck really chooses to explore.
In 1955, Elia Kazan directed a film version, a color-crazy Cinemascope melodrama that told only Cal and Aron’s part of the story; Significantly, this was James Dean’s first film and will live on forever. Writing in The Times in 2005, Kenneth Turan called the film “not only one of Kazan’s richest films and Dean’s first major role” but also “arguably the actor’s best performance”.
Kazan’s granddaughter, Zoe Kazan, wrote the script for the new seven-episode “East of Eden” adaptation, which premieres on Netflix on Thursday, and served as co-showrunner with Jeb Stuart. Although much of what is ultimately a very long book is omitted, it covers its chronology in its entirety, putting Cathy front and center in the trailer and the show, thanks in large part to Florence Pugh’s performance as her most dynamic character.
The Cauldron begins with a badly beaten woman dragging herself through the night, and a female voice delivers an edited, detailed version of the author’s thoughts about difference. (A book full of thoughts.) “I believe that there are monsters in this world born to human parents… A child may have a perfect body but be born lacking in kindness and the potential for conscience. However, you must remember that everyone is normal in their own way. And to a monster, norms must seem monstrous.” Given that the novel’s narrator is Steinbeck, it’s hard to tell who the “I” is here, but I assume the gender switch has something to do with the desire to give this version a literal female voice.
The monster is Cathy, who crawls onto the porch of the farmhouse where Charles (Mike Faist), who thinks they should call the sheriff, lives and Adam (Christopher Abbott), who is forced to look after her. Close your eyes if you don’t want to know more about this 73-year-old bestseller, but Cathy probably drove a man to suicide and definitely burned down his house while his parents were locked inside. She was beaten by her former pimp, whose mistress she was and from whom she stole. “Sociopath” you might be thinking.
The series is set 25 years ago on a farm in Connecticut; Here the father, Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts), a fixed-legged Civil War veteran, creates a long trail of jealousy by rejecting Charles’s gift of a new knife in favor of the stray puppy gifted by Adam. She will then send pacifist Adam into the army (because she says she loves him better), while Charles will unfortunately have to stay and work on the farm (though he proves to be good at it). The man returns home after years of service and living in the tramp forests.
Featured actors include Hoon Lee (left) as Lee and Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton.
(Kirsty Griffin/Netflix)
Cathy crawls towards their door; Charles sees through her, which will earn him his respect, but Adam falls in love with her, marries her, and drags her west to California; He doesn’t want to go there and he doesn’t plan to stay. (She’s pretty straightforward about it, but Adam is a bad listener.) She gives birth to Cal (young, Bodhi Aisher; old, Joseph Zada), who grows up to wonder if she’s bad, and Aron (young, Jonah Wren Phillips; old, Joe Anders), who everyone thinks is good, and returns to a life of prostitution, which suits her just fine. And that’s probably enough of a plot for me to tell.
Pugh impressively represents Cathy’s outer self through successive stages; Although he has various crises to overcome, he is not a character born to evolve, and the actor imbues him with as much nuance as the role allows. Although Hoon Lee has standout performances as Lee, a philosophical, intellectual, American-born Chinese man who works for Adam and becomes a sort of surrogate mother to Cal and Aron, he’s the main reason to watch; and Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton, a jolly Irishman who stands in for Steinbeck’s own family, the only remaining Hamiltons in the novel. Faist has a lot to do with the quiet and understanding Charles. The never-great Martha Plimpton plays Faye, the lady for whom Cathy works; and Zoe Phillips makes an impression in her scattered scenes as Abra Bacon, who is about to date Aron but feels committed to Cal.
Kazan and Stuart cover all the major plots and themes: good and evil, love and jealousy, inherited character, and (most importantly) the possibility of change. Inevitably the text was cut and channeled, parts were replaced, bits of exposition were screwed into dialogue, and events described in a paragraph were turned into scenes. Some of the thoughts in Cathy’s mind became concrete.
The adapters don’t add a lot of material of their own, Steinbeck provided rich character descriptions, back story, philosophical musings, and social criticism for each situation, but they will occasionally make a point or introduce something new to make sense of Cathy. But they don’t go overboard with it. (Steinbeck spends some time on him, declaring him unrecognizable, recanting his earlier “monster” comments: “Who knows, but he’s tried to tell someone or anyone what he looks like and can’t because there’s no common language. It’s easy to say he’s evil, but it doesn’t mean much unless we know why.”) Oddly, the Cain and Abel elements in the Cal and Aron story that launched Dean’s career aren’t really notable.
If nothing else, the miniseries reminds us that adaptation is a difficult task, one that becomes more difficult the more complex and famous the original text, and the more necessary it is to honor it. (This is why pulp fiction has produced so many memorable films.) Everything is lost in translation, especially from the pictures in your head to the images on the screen. If you are going to film a literary monument and a period piece, you will have to spend some money.
But the production here betrays its economy, and Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s direction is held down by mournful strings and devoid of color. The New Zealand landscape echoes the rolling hills of Central California during a dry season, but it is a bleak image, not the paradise of Steinbeck’s memoir, book, or metaphor.