John Steinbeck’s East of Eden gave us one of 20th-century literature’s great villains: the manipulative, cruel and sociopathic Cathy Ames. But with A-lister Florence Pugh cast as Cathy, this sumptuous adaptation (Netflix, from Thursday) was always going to deliver a more sympathetic portrait of the character. And so it goes, more or less, in a miniseries that sets out to paint Cathy as equal parts victim and nemesis.
Writer and co-showrunner Zoe Kazan oversees this new Eden, and the project is obviously personal, given that her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1950s film adaptation featuring James Dean. But the show really belongs to Pugh – who is on board with Kazan’s eagerness to make ghastly Cathy sympathetic, though only to a degree.
East of Eden makes plain how Cathy has been brutalised in a post-civil war United States defined by its misogyny. Yet Marvel movie star Pugh is keen to locate the pantomime monster buried beneath Kazan’s sympathetic script.
To that end, her performance has the quality of an unexploded bomb. She hides her thoughts behind blank eyes and moves through the series like an icebreaker at full steam. It’s a glorious turn – all the more powerful for feeling ever so slightly out of kilter with the script’s wish to humanise Cathy, when Pugh seems to have concluded that she has proceeded to a place beyond emotion.
Pugh is introduced bloodied and crawling through the dirt. But East of Eden then rewinds to the origins of the brothers whose lives will be torn apart when she arrives like a whirlwind bent on destruction. They are the Cain-and-Abel duo of Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist, inheriting the mantle from Dean), raised on a Connecticut farm by a cruel father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts), high on the vapours of the allegedly heroic sacrifices he made in the American civil war.
They’re a study in contrasts. Adam is quiet and melancholy; Charles volatile and resentful of the love their father shows Adam and denies him. Yet this is the Pugh show, and the series gains a jolt of electricity when Cathy re-enters – though fair warning: she is largely absent from the first episode. Ciarán Hinds eventually clops into view, too, to deliver a quietly impressive performance as a kindly Irish neighbour who looks out for Adam after he moves to California to make a new start.
Kazan has said she wanted to introduce nuance to Steinbeck’s biblical tale. “If we think about people that are evil or bad as being not human, we don’t learn anything about ourselves,” she told journalists. She certainly does not stint on depicting the cruelties inflicted on Cathy, who escapes an impoverished upbringing by becoming a prostitute – though only after burning her parents to death.
Her East of Eden achieves that ambition to an extent. But it is ultimately a showcase for Pugh’s star power. Her Cathy is so ferocious a creation she is almost too much for this, in many ways traditional, costume epic to contain. It is a riveting showing, but at times it overwhelms Kazan’s thoughtful take on Steinbeck’s classic.