+34
New miniseries starring Florence Pugh will surely draw comparisons: Legend Elia Kazan directed the movie, while his granddaughter Zoe Kazan wrote the new series
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.
That’s the story of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel East of Eden , a saga that follows the Trask family from the aftermath of the American Civil War to the Great War. It may seem perverse then to pit the 1955 film adaptation of Steinbeck’s sprawling book against the new miniseries that’s out this week on Netflix.
The classic movie starring James Dean , only endeavoured to cover the last quarter of Steinbeck’s narrative - and took creative liberties. The Netflix version starring Florence Pugh, meanwhile, attempts to reverently cover the novel’s full scope.
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’s Salinas Valley at the start of the 20th. The compulsion to compare and contrast these takes on Steinbeck’s multigenerational epic made 70 years apart, however, comes from the family connection between them.
The late legend Elia Kazan directed the movie, while his granddaughter Zoe Kazan is the writer of the miniseries. 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. Though it was not shot in 3-D as originally planned, Elia Kazan’s film, scripted by Paul Osborn, still is full of performances that leap off the screen.
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.
Julie Harris is more anchored and yet equally alive in her portrayal of Abra, a young woman pulled between Cal and his brother Aron. 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. The performances are restrained to the point of repression, the writing overly reverent to source and the visuals too often simply drab.
Zoe Kazan’s 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. Tracy Letts, in one of the only performances that really lifts off the screen, plays Cyril as a cruel conman. 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.
“I love you better,” Cyril tells Adam, in a line pretty much directly lifted from Steinbeck. “Why else would I have given myself the trouble for hurting you? ” After Cyril’s death, his sons Adam and Charles 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.
Cathy 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. It’s 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.
The young adult twins’ dawning realization that their mother is a madam forms the conflict for the final episodes, as it does the movie. Thematically, Steinbeck’s novel is focused on the choice between good and bad - which he distills down to the Hebrew word timshel or “thou mayst,” which was translated instead as “thou shalt” in the King James Bible. So it’s a mysterious aspect of the book that Cathy is depicted as inexplicably evil.
The narrator insists that Cathy has a “malformed soul”: “She was not like other people, never was from birth. ” 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. Pugh is often compelling playing grown-up Cathy as a woman who will never let herself be trapped by a male again.
But there’s never any sympathizing with her calculated cruelty, at times full-on psychopathy. Unfortunately, Cathy is not the only character it’s hard to root for. Abbott’s portrayal of Adam Trask is morose throughout, his goodness always shown as flimsy; it’s hard to distinguish the character’s depressive period from the rest of his life. The only goodness that really convinces comes from Hoon Lee, wonderful as Lee, Adam’s servant who becomes a surrogate parent to Cal and Aron.
The Chinese-American character gets filled out with a trip to San Francisco in an episode co-written by Alexander Chee. Too many of the others feel trapped in two-dimensional allegory. Zoe Kazan’s adaptation is judgmental about the American past and pessimistic about its future. 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.
Canada Latest News, Canada Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Best Streaming Picks: East of Eden Miniseries, Carrie Remake, and Yaga Lead the Latest RoundupThis monthly streaming guide highlights top TV shows and movies available in Canada, featuring Zoe Kazan's adaptation of East of Eden, a modern-day remake of the horror classic Carrie, and the new series Yaga. Other notable releases include a Canadian coastal thriller about a sea creature and a crime thriller starring Ben Affleck.
Read more »
'East of Eden' Isn’t Afraid to Ask the Hard Questions | ELLE Canada Magazine | Beauty, Fashion and Lifestyle Trends & Celebrity NewsCreator Zoe Kazan and star Florence Pugh open up about the John Steinbeck adaptation of East of Eden, which is streaming on Netflix now.
Read more »
Orléans East-Cumberland: Here's who's running to be your Ottawa city councillorSix people are lining up to challenge Matthew Luloff for the Orléans East-Cumberland seat he has held for two terms.
Read more »
US Sends 9,000 Troops to Middle East as Trump Warns of Possible New Strikes on IranThe US military is dispatching roughly 9,000 troops aboard a group of ships to the Middle East, including a third aircraft carrier, as President Trump warned of possible new strikes on Iran and said early indications link Tehran to the FlyDubai co-pilot attack.
Read more »