It is rarely difficult to distinguish between a John Steinbeck novel and a ray of sunshine. The new adaptation of his 1952 book East of Eden doesn’t buck the trend and wastes no time plunging us into the murk. The opening scene follows a beaten, bloodied woman as she crawls across a muddy field towards the only house for miles around. Out of the house come two brothers. One rushes to rescue her. The other takes one look and announces: “This is a mistake.” Brother, you have no idea.
The rescuer is Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott), the sceptic Charles (Mike Faist). Cut back 25 years to watch them being raised in misery in an essentially motherless household by their monstrous father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts), a civil war veteran and ceaseless recounter of his heroics therein. Charles longs to follow in his footsteps. Adam is beaten for his lack of aggressive instinct. But it is Adam whom Cyrus sends to enlist and Charles he forces to stay behind and work on the family farm. “Because,” he says to Adam in a rare instance of paternal wisdom, “there are loose things in him that should be reined down.”
As a resentment-fuelled Charles nearly kills Adam the night before he leaves for the army, you can see Cyrus’s point. But years later, Dad is dead, leaving behind an almost certainly ill-gotten fortune. Adam comes home; the brothers put the past behind them and begin to carve out a decent life on the farm.
And then comes Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), the battered, bloodied woman crawling across the field to damn them all.
Evil just for kicks? … Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames in East of Eden. Photograph: Netflix
East of Eden was Steinbeck’s penultimate major work; he thought it his finest. Critics disagreed. They thought its examination of good and evil – whether we are born to be one or the other, whether we have a choice, how much we can fight our instincts – was heavy-handed and the author guilty of an intrusive moralism that prevented the book from ringing true. The public, however, took it to heart as a soapy family drama – Cain and Abel, but out west and set over three generations. Perhaps this was not what Steinbeck intended, but it made the novel an instant bestseller.
It’s on this plane that the new version, by Zoe Kazan (the granddaughter of Elia, who directed the 1955 film adaptation starring an unknown actor called James Dean) works best. Lavishly shot, full of emotional and physical incident and fine performances, there is little chance to be distracted.Adam falls hopelessly in love with Cathy while the far more worldly-wise Charles looks on with contempt and despair.
The second episode unpacks her torrid backstory – the born manipulator, leaving desperate boys and suicidal men in her wake, who moves into prostitution as a pragmatic business move and specialises in practices that most 19th-century whorehouses were hoping wouldn’t make it that far west until the internet age, betraying benefactors, committing arson, faking her death and abandoning husbands and eventually babies in her quest for riches and freedom. Or possibly just for kicks.
Cathy’s sociopathy or psychopathy was part of the critical rejection of the book – a woman couldn’t possibly! – that feels dated now, but it doesn’t mean it has become much more interesting in the years since. Pugh does what she can with the part – but Cathy remains a spectacle to be ogled rather than a fully fledged character.
A welcome chance to breathe … Hoon Lee as Lee with Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton in East of Eden. Photograph: Kristy Griffin/Netflix
The men – some things never change – fare better. The brothers have much to get their teeth into, as they struggle with their love and hate for each other, for her, for their lives and for their father. One of the most finely drawn and touching relationships grows gradually between Adam’s neighbour Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds), once Adam and Cathy have moved to the Salinas valley, and Adam’s manservant, Lee (Hoon Lee) ; it gives us a welcome chance to breathe. A lovely performance from Martha Plimpton as the unexpectedly vulnerable brothel madam Faye – first Cathy’s boss, then another of Cathy’s victims – helps aerate things, too.
As a high-quality family saga, then, it’s brilliant, compelling entertainment. As an excoriation of human nature, as an examination of how helpless we are before our inborn proclivities, it perhaps cannot help but lack the heft it needs.
East of Eden is on Netflix