{"id":918847,"date":"2026-10-03T08:30:15","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T08:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/918847\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T08:30:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T08:30:15","slug":"east-of-eden-review-netflixs-adaptation-feels-flat-and-restrained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/918847\/","title":{"rendered":"East of Eden review: Netflix’s adaptation feels flat and restrained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Martha Plimpton (left) as Faye and Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames in the new Netflix adaptation.Geoffrey Short\/Netflix<\/p>\n

The United States of America is rarely united. It is the Cain and Abel of countries, a land of brothers who split into camps and pit themselves against each other time and time again.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the story of John Steinbeck\u2019s 1952 novel East of Eden, a saga that follows the Trask family from the aftermath of the American Civil War to the Great War.<\/p>\n

It may seem perverse then to pit the 1955 film adaptation of Steinbeck\u2019s sprawling book against the new miniseries that\u2019s out this week on Netflix.<\/p>\n

The classic movie starring James Dean (clocking in at under two hours), only endeavoured to cover the last quarter of Steinbeck\u2019s narrative – and took creative liberties.<\/p>\n

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The Netflix version starring Florence Pugh, meanwhile, attempts to reverently cover the novel\u2019s full scope. <\/p>\n

Over seven hours, it first dives into one generation of good-and-bad Trask brothers in Connecticut in the late 19th century, then does so again with the next generation of them in California\u2019s Salinas Valley at the start of the 20th.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The performances in the new miniseries are restrained to the point of repression, writes Nestruck.Netflix<\/p>\n

The compulsion to compare and contrast these takes on Steinbeck\u2019s multigenerational epic made 70 years apart, however, comes from the family connection between them. <\/p>\n

The late legend Elia Kazan directed the movie, while his granddaughter Zoe Kazan is the writer of the miniseries.<\/p>\n

Watching the two in tandem this week did not necessarily make me feel like the arc of American screen adaptation was bending toward the better.<\/p>\n

Though it was not shot in 3-D as originally planned, Elia Kazan\u2019s film, scripted by Paul Osborn, still is full of performances that leap off the screen. <\/p>\n

Dean, whose career was a brief flicker of a candle, gives a nervy portrayal of young Californian Cal Trask. He physically wrestles with his internalized feeling of badness and the shame of a mother who chose the brothel over raising him and his brother from one side of each carefully composed widescreen CinemaScope frame to the other.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Hoon Lee (left) as Lee and Ciar\u00e1n Hinds as Samuel Hamilton.GEOFFREY SHORT\/Netflix<\/p>\n

Julie Harris is more anchored and yet equally alive in her portrayal of Abra, a young woman pulled between Cal and his brother Aron. <\/p>\n

By contrast, everything feels flat in the new Netflix miniseries – directed by Garth Davis in its first episodes and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre in its later ones.<\/p>\n

The performances are restrained to the point of repression, the writing overly reverent to source and the visuals too often simply drab.<\/p>\n

Zoe Kazan\u2019s adaptation of East of Eden begins in Connecticut where a strict father Cyril Trask, a Civil War veteran of sorts, is raising two sons from different moms.<\/p>\n

Tracy Letts, in one of the only performances that really lifts off the screen, plays Cyril as a cruel conman. (Letts, the playwright of August: Osage Country, knows his way around an allegorical American family saga.)<\/p>\n

Cyril raises his sons to hate each other, beating the peaceful Adam and making him enlist in the army, while forcing the pugilistic Charles to stay home on the farm.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love you better,\u201d Cyril tells Adam, in a line pretty much directly lifted from Steinbeck. \u201cWhy else would I have given myself the trouble for hurting you?\u201d <\/p>\n

After Cyril\u2019s death, his sons Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist) manage to co-exist together on the family farm as adults until a woman, almost beaten to death, shows up to divide them again anew.<\/p>\n

Cathy (Pugh) is nursed back to health by the supposedly good Adam – and viewed with suspicion by Charles who sees something of his supposedly darker nature in her.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Cathy who will give birth to the next generation of feuding Trask brothers – twins Caleb and Aron – in California and then shoot her way out of stifling marriage and motherhood to return to brothel life under the name of Kate. <\/p>\n

The young adult twins\u2019 dawning realization that their mother is a madam forms the conflict for the final episodes, as it does the movie.<\/p>\n

Thematically, Steinbeck\u2019s novel is focused on the choice between good and bad – which he distills down to the Hebrew word timshel or \u201cthou mayst,\u201d which was translated instead as \u201cthou shalt\u201d in the King James Bible.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s a mysterious aspect of the book that Cathy is depicted as inexplicably evil. The narrator insists that Cathy has a \u201cmalformed soul\u201d: \u201cShe was not like other people, never was from birth.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her adaptation, Zoe Kazan has decided the narrator is wrong and, inspired by a brief reference by Cathy to Alice in Wonderland in the novel, invents a childhood moment that curdled Cathy into who she is.<\/p>\n

Pugh is often compelling playing grown-up Cathy as a woman who will never let herself be trapped by a male again. But there\u2019s never any sympathizing with her calculated cruelty, at times full-on psychopathy. <\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Cathy is not the only character it\u2019s hard to root for. Abbott\u2019s portrayal of Adam Trask is morose throughout, his goodness always shown as flimsy; it\u2019s hard to distinguish the character\u2019s depressive period from the rest of his life.<\/p>\n

The only goodness that really convinces comes from Hoon Lee, wonderful as Lee, Adam\u2019s servant who becomes a surrogate parent to Cal and Aron. <\/p>\n

The Chinese-American character gets filled out with a trip to San Francisco in an episode co-written by Alexander Chee.<\/p>\n

Too many of the others feel trapped in two-dimensional allegory.<\/p>\n

Zoe Kazan\u2019s adaptation is judgmental about the American past and pessimistic about its future. <\/p>\n

That reflects the general mood south of the border right now, once again splitting apart – but an East of Eden without the hopefulness encapsulated by timshel is a bleak one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Martha Plimpton (left) as Faye and Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918848,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75,2922,119272],"class_list":["post-918847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-noastack","tag-streamingbestof"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=918847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918847\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}