Zoe Kazan<\/a> has written the screenplay and worked with Jeb Stuart as co-showrunners for a new \u201cEast of Eden\u201d adaptation, a seven-episode miniseries debuting Thursday on Netflix. Though it omits a sizable chunk of what is after all a very long book, it takes its chronology whole, putting Cathy front and center in the publicity and in the show, owing largely to Florence Pugh\u2018s performance as its most dynamic character.<\/p>\nKazan begins her telling with a badly beaten woman dragging herself through the night as a female voice delivers an edited, elaborated version of the author\u2019s thoughts on difference. (It is a book brimming with thoughts.) \u201cI believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents \u2026 A child may be born perfect of body but without kindness or the potential of conscience. Still, you must not forget, everyone is normal to himself. And to a monster, the norm must seem monstrous.\u201d Given that the novel\u2019s narrator is Steinbeck, it\u2019s hard to say just who the \u201cI\u201d is here, but I assume the gender swap has something to do with wanting to literally give this version a female voice.<\/p>\n
The monster is Cathy, crawling to the porch of the farmhouse occupied by Charles (Mike Faist), who thinks they should call the sheriff, and Adam (Christopher Abbott), who is compelled to care for her. Close your eyes if you don\u2019t want to know anything more about this 73-year-old bestseller, but Cathy has already possibly driven a man to suicide and definitely burned down her house with her parents locked inside. She was beaten up by her former pimp, whose mistress she\u2019d become and from whom she was stealing. You may be thinking \u201csociopath.\u201d<\/p>\n
The series backs up 25 years to a Connecticut farm where father Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts), a peg-legged Civil War veteran, rejects Charles\u2019 gift of a new knife in favor of Adam\u2019s present of a stray puppy, creating a long trail of jealousy. He\u2019ll later pack pacifistic Adam off to the army (because, he says, he loves him better), with Charles unhappily constrained to stay and work the farm (though he proves good at it). After years in service and living in hobo jungles, Adam returns home. <\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1790847009_828_.jpeg\")
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Standout performers include Hoon Lee as Lee, left, and Ciara\u0301n Hinds as Samuel Hamilton.<\/p>\n
(Kirsty Griffin \/ Netflix)<\/p>\n
Cathy crawls to their doorstep; Charles sees through her, which will earn him her respect, but Adam falls for her, marries her and drags her west to California, where she doesn\u2019t want to go and doesn\u2019t plan to stay. (She\u2019s quite upfront about this, but Adam is a poor listener.) She gives birth to Cal (younger, Bodhi Aisher; older, Joseph Zada), who will grow up to wonder if he\u2019s bad, and Aron (younger, Jonah Wren Phillips; older, Joe Anders), whom everyone thinks is good, and returns to the life of a prostitute, which suits her fine. And that is probably enough plot for me to relate.<\/p>\n
Pugh impressively represents Cathy\u2019s outward self through successive stages; she\u2019s not a character born to develop, though she will have various crises to navigate, and the actor imbues her with as much nuance as the part allows. She\u2019s the main reason to watch, though there are standout performances from Hoon Lee as Lee, a philosophical, intellectual, American-born Chinese man who works for Adam and becomes a kind of surrogate mother to Cal and Aron; and from Ciar\u00e1n Hinds as Samuel Hamilton, a jovial Irishman, virtually the only remnant of the novel\u2019s Hamiltons, who stand in for Steinbeck\u2019s own family. Faist does a lot with the taciturn, perceptive Charles. Martha Plimpton, never not great, plays Faye, a madam for whom Cathy works; and Zoe Phillips makes an impression in her scattered scenes as Abra Bacon, who\u2019ll date Aron but feels connected to Cal.<\/p>\n
Kazan and Stuart do cover all the main plot points and themes \u2014 good and evil, love and jealousy, inherited character and (the big one) the possibility of change. Unavoidably the text has been chopped and channeled, with some swapping of parts, bits of narration screwed into dialogue and events described in a paragraph blown out into scenes. Certain thoughts inside Cathy\u2019s head have been made concrete. <\/p>\n
The adapters don\u2019t add too much material of their own, Steinbeck having provided a wealth of character descriptions, backstory, philosophical rumination and social criticism for every occasion, but here and there they\u2019ll stress a point or provide something new in order to make sense of Cathy. But they don\u2019t overdo it. (Steinbeck, declaring her unknowable, cuts her a lot of slack, walking back his earlier \u201cmonster\u201d comments: \u201cWho knows but that she tried to tell someone or everyone what she was like and could not, for lack of a common language. It is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.\u201d) Oddly, the Cain and Abel elements in the Cal and Aron story, which launched Dean\u2019s career, don\u2019t really register.<\/p>\n
If nothing else, the miniseries reminds us that adaptation is a difficult job that grows harder the more complex and celebrated the original text, and the more necessary it is to honor it. (This is why pulp fiction has produced so many memorable movies.) Things will always be lost in translation, not least from the pictures in your head to the pictures on the screen. If you\u2019re going to film a literary monument, and a period piece to boot, you\u2019re going to have to spend some money. <\/p>\n
But the production here betrays its economy, and the direction, by Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, remains earthbound, held down by mournful strings and devoid of color. The New Zealand landscape does echo the rolling hills of Central California, in a dry season, but it\u2019s a dreary vision, hardly the paradise of Steinbeck\u2019s memory, book or metaphor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Steinbeck\u2019s 1952 novel \u201cEast of Eden,\u201d an Oprah\u2019s Book Club Selection in 2003, is a retelling, or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481453,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[188746,188748,188751,10109,188747,6193,10810,188750,135089,188753,188749,188752,48,52,51,47,50,49,24261,129456,31168],"class_list":["post-481452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-adam-trask","tag-aron","tag-aron-part","tag-cal","tag-cathy-ames","tag-character","tag-east","tag-eden","tag-elia-kazan","tag-film-version","tag-half-brother-charles","tag-impressive-florence-pugh","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-novel","tag-steinbeck","tag-thought"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}