To adapt John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for television is a heavy endeavor under any circumstances. Steinbeck’s sprawling novel, covering half a century of American history through the fictional Trask family, is considered his greatest work, which is no small statement considering he is the author of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men. The novel is bookended by the Civil War and the First World War—covering the transition from horseback to automobile. Add biblical themes borrowed from the book of Genesis (particularly the story of Cain and Abel), and you have what amounts to some heavy lifting for any creator to bring to screen.
The most famous adaptation of East of Eden heretofore is Elia Kazan’s 1955 film starring James Dean and Raymond Massey as the star-crossed brothers Trask, and Jo Van Fleet as their troubled mother Kate (formerly known as Cathy). The film is just one of three that Dean completed before his death on September 30, 1955, and the only one released to theaters while he was still alive. It’s also considered a modern classic.
Add to that the fact that Zoe Kazan (Elia’s granddaughter) is tackling this complex, epic material, and you have a remarkably ambitious and perilous challenge for a filmmaker—one steeped in literary and cinematic excellence, as well as blood. Zoe Kazan isn’t facing down just one legendary work, but two, the second of which carries her surname (no pressure). Yet through what I can only imagine was a combination of rigor, inspiration, and execution, Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden not only honors the source material but exceeds her grandfather’s film.
By adapting East of Eden for television as a limited series, Zoe Kazan can cover the entire novel. Elia Kazan’s film covered only the last third, focusing on the Trask brothers Caleb and Aron and leaving out the story of their father, Adam, and his brother, Charles. Zoe’s version also depicts Cathy, the mother of Caleb and Aron, in a manner more closely aligned with Steinbeck’s novel. Elia’s film softens Cathy (one of the great antagonists in literary history) significantly. Zoe’s series splits the difference by adding a traumatic backstory for Cathy not found in the novel. In doing so, Zoe has, I dare say, made Cathy more complex than she was in Steinbeck’s tome. Her actions are still horrifying, but with a root cause, they are more understandable. Where Steinbeck casts Cathy as evil, Zoe presents her as a villain, yes, but one with reasons.
It doesn’t hurt that Cathy is portrayed by the extraordinary Florence Pugh, in a fashion so dedicated and unsympathetic that it all but beggars belief. Pugh’s performance isn’t just the best I’ve seen on television this year, but the best I’ve seen on screens small or large in some time.
The series begins with a bloody and beaten Cathy crawling to the house of a Connecticut farm co-owned by Charles (Mike Faist) and Adam (Christopher Abbott). Adam is more open-hearted and falls for Cathy as she convalesces on the farm. Charles rightly sees trouble in Cathy, who creates a rift between the brothers, resulting in Adam marrying Cathy and moving out west to California to make a place for him, his wife, and the family that he intends to create. Adam’s vision of the future is one Cathy has no desire for, which she has made plain to him. Adam’s great folly is in believing she will come around.
After Cathy’s bloody arrival at the farmhouse, the series flashes back to Charles and Adam’s childhood. The brothers are linked by their overbearing father (Tracy Letts), a Union Civil War soldier who lost his leg in battle. The boys do not share a mother. Adam’s mother has died, and Charles’ mother has taken her place. The rift that develops between Adam and Charles (played, respectively, as adolescents by Costa D’Angelo and Tom Sweet) is sparked by their father, who regularly beats the more sensitive Adam while being more forgiving of Charles, a boy whose skill with a gun and harder demeanor please the patriarch. Still, when it comes time to choose a future for his sons (who clearly are not allowed to pick their own), the old man makes a confounding choice that serves neither boy.
For years, the brothers are estranged, until one returns home, and the two men reconcile and seem to be on a path toward forgiveness and harmony.
Then Cathy arrives.
Over the seven extraordinary episodes of East of Eden, Cathy serves as the linchpin upon which this tragic tale turns. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu would be left wide-eyed if they saw Cathy’s diabolical machinations. She ruins the still-healing relationship between Adam and Charles. She gives Adam twin sons (Aron and Caleb), but then breaks the family apart shortly after their arrival. She is a woman who annihilates families in both the literal and figurative sense, and woe to any man or woman in the brothel industry who would seek to employ or partner with her.
Cathy is remarkably deceitful and damaged, but neither Pugh nor Zoe Kazan’s screenplay tries to redeem her. They only want you to understand this woman who brings misery to all who make her acquaintance, and ultimately, unto herself. Cathy was born into a world that offered her no agency or safety. She uses her beauty and her body to control the men who would control her, because her form is the closest thing she has to currency. She is habitually incapable of giving or receiving love. Cathy reminds me of words spoken by Juliette Binoche in Louis Malle’s great 1992 film, Damage:
“Damaged people are dangerous. They know how to survive.”
Cathy is a survivor (although surviving Cathy is another matter altogether), and while she can’t connect to love, she can connect to guilt. Late in the series, someone she thought she had left behind discovers her, and to her surprise, she is left shaken. Pugh manages the moment with a mixture of rawness and skill that is genuinely astonishing. As she begins to break down publicly, she tries to laugh to hide her anguish. The contortions Pugh’s face makes as she lurches from control to crumble are a terrifying sight. Pugh, despite her youth, has long announced herself as a great actor, and Cathy is the kind of accomplishment you lead your resume with. Hell, it’s the kind of detail that makes the front of your obituary.
To Zoe Kazan’s credit, she has cast the roles around Pugh’s force of nature with actors who can hold their own. Faist is tremendous as the adult Charles. He plays a man whose desired future was stolen from him by his father, but who has built a successful life as a farmer. Then, just when his regretful heart begins to warm after his brother returns to the farm, Cathy robs him of a second hopeful future.
Christopher Abbott has the most thankless role: the adult Adam. He may play the older brother, but he lacks confidence, trusts too easily, and is often oblivious to that which others can see. Most pertinently, Cathy will destroy him. Adam is the most passive character in the show, and passivity is not the easiest affect for an actor to play. But Abbott’s expressive face (even under a thick beard) and vulnerable eyes keep Adam from becoming a slack on-screen presence.
In smaller roles, Ciarin Hinds and Marthe Plimpton offer outstanding support. Hinds is an Irishman named Hamilton who befriends Adam in California after helping him and Cathy to find a parcel of land. In Steinbeck’s novel, the Hamilton family is a near-equal presence to the Trasks. In Zoe Kazan’s telling, the Hamiltons are significantly trimmed. Unsurprisingly, Hinds maximizes his time on screen, making Hamilton’s every scene count. Plimpton plays a brothel madam who makes the mistake of partnering with Cathy—one that will cost her everything. Plimpton has been so good for so long in parts small and large that her excellence can be taken for granted. Her work in East of Eden adds a new entry to her already impressive resume.
As notable as everyone in the cast is, it is Hoon Lee as Lee, a Chinese-American servant employed by Adam in California who will likely strike many as a revelation. I first noticed Lee in the great pulpy Cinemax series Banshee well over a decade ago. In Banshee, he played Job, a criminal computer hacker who didn’t just own his queerness like armor; he took possession of every scene he appeared in. Job was hilarious, bold, and surprisingly moving. While Lee has done excellent work in subsequent series like Warrior and Your Friends & Neighbors, he never received a role to match Job.
That is, until now.
Lee’s character may begin as a servant, but he becomes so much more than that after Adam’s sons are born and Cathy abandons her family. Lee becomes a ballast for Adam, who is too heartbroken to raise his children. He becomes a surrogate father to Aron and Caleb (played as young adults by Joe Andrews and Joseph Zada). But Lee is no soft servant. He challenges Adam to become a father, even as Lee comes to love them as if they were his own. He confronts Adam about his weakness with his sons, pushing him to tell the boys the truth about who Cathy was and who she has become.
What starts as advice soon turns into a reckoning. Lee tells Adam his own story. He puts Adam on his back foot by telling him, “In all the time I’ve cared for your family, you’ve never asked about mine.” Adam becomes sheepish, and what follows is a devastating three-minute monologue detailing the horrifying story of how Lee came into the world on the bigoted soil of America, and how he is grateful that his father did not hide the truth of his beginnings from him. He then connects his story to Adam, telling him he must tell his sons the truth of their mother, or he will surely reap the sowing of his inaction and dishonesty. The two men then rise from the table, and as Adam huffs and puffs in a vain and naive effort to maintain the value of his perspective, Lee raises his voice and leaves Adam speechless. In a series full of powerful scenes, the confrontation between Lee and Adam is the most breathtaking.
Those who have been unaware of Hoon Lee before now will have their ignorance shattered. Lee starts quietly, then rises in stature and command, becoming the heart of East of Eden. In a show with A-list talent surrounding him at every turn, Lee’s only match is Pugh. I’d bet that after this weekend, his name will be on the lips of many from now until next year’s Emmys.
Among the many aspects that make Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden so exemplary is the harsh light it shines on American history over more than half a century. For all that is good and worthy about this limited series, and that is to say every second of its 414-minute running time, what resonates most is that Steinbeck’s story of the Trask family is a vehicle for greater themes. One could certainly be captured by East of Eden’s core story of a family that may or may not find its way through the darkness of its grim history to a better future.
Zoe Kazan’s iteration of Steinbeck’s seminal work suggests that the Trasks’ search for healing, freedom, and a higher plane in the face of internal flaws and external pressure, in one way or another, encompasses all of us. All who have lived in this country whose sins have not been faced, let alone dealt with. It’s not just a tale of fathers and sons, of competing brothers, or the failure of humans to connect; it’s also the story of industrial progress, who gets left out and who will never get let in. Themes of race, othering, and the treatment of women come to the fore. East of Eden illuminates the plight of generations whose contributions to this country were lost to history, or disallowed altogether, because they were not white men.
The vicious cycle of the Trasks mirrors that of the United States. We hide what is ugly and unpleasant. We push it away because we are too afraid, too ashamed, or too awful to confront the truth. As Lee tells Adam that his evasion, his lies by commission and omission, will not serve his children today or in the future, I couldn’t help but think of how his words apply to so much more than one family’s woes.
In writing East of Eden, Steinbeck drew inspiration from Genesis. What Zoe Kazan has given us is the revelation. Make of that what “thou mayest.”
All episodes of East of Eden are available to stream now on Netflix
