‘East of Eden’ Review: A Terrifying Florence Pugh Towers Over Zoe Kazan’s Accomplished Netflix Adaptation of the John Steinbeck Classic

Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of East of Eden is a bold prestige melodrama of the sort Hollywood rarely makes these days. It’s a sumptuously produced throwback, featuring a tormented, screen-searing performance from James Dean that was instantly and tragically iconic.

As a filmed version of John Steinbeck‘s classic novel, however, Kazan’s East of Eden borders on dreadful. The two-hour film takes the Biblical sprawl and generational richness of the book and, in tackling only its final third, reduces it to an earnestly felt love story laced with occasional daddy issues. It’s so divorced from the best aspects of the source material that it barely earns its title at all.

East of Eden

The Bottom Line Imperfect but admirably nuanced.

Airdate: Thursday, October 1 (Netflix)
Cast: Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, Hoon Lee, Joseph Zada, Joe Anders
Creator: Zoe Kazan, from the novel by John Steinbeck

Some 70+ years later (with a 1981 ABC miniseries wedged in the middle), Zoe Kazan, Elia’s granddaughter, comes far closer to successfully tackling and reckoning with the depths of Steinbeck’s East of Eden in her seven-part Netflix production.

This East of Eden, adapted primarily by Kazan — Alexander Chee co-wrote a key midseason episode — with Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directing, still struggles to capture the full scope of the novel, and no single performance can match the paradigm-shifting unease embodied by Dean. But it’s rich, morally complex and packed with memorable performances, notably by star and executive producer Florence Pugh, as well as Hoon Lee in a part that was reprehensibly cut entirely from the film.

East of Eden is one of those challenging pieces of storytelling in which any description of the plot fails to capture the totality of the tableau, and in which reducing that storytelling to “plot,” as frequently happens here, becomes limiting. Even seven episodes isn’t enough to nail the book, but I don’t know that more screen time would have made any difference.

It’s a reconfiguring of the Book of Genesis set amid the Western expansion of the American dream in the late 1800s and early 1900s, told primarily through the lives of two sets of brothers whose jockeying for paternal affection leads to tragedy, facilitated by one particularly venal anti-heroine.

We start with half-brothers Adam (ultimately Christopher Abbott) and Charles (ultimately Mike Faist) Trask, who grow up under the demanding eye of father Cyrus (Tracy Letts), a one-legged Civil War hero who guides them with military rigor. Adam is smart and kind, but gentle to the point of passivity. Charles is dark and brooding, but proficient in manly pursuits. The brothers go in different directions, but find themselves sharing the family farm in Connecticut.

One night, Cathy (Pugh) arrives at their doorstep, horribly beaten and seemingly unable to remember her past. Adam, a natural caregiver, is instantly smitten, but Charles recognizes something dark and possibly monstrous in Cathy, because he possesses similar demons.

Eventually, the story migrates to California’s Salinas Valley, as we’re introduced to jovial, pathologically unlucky Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds), who helps Adam find a stunning piece of real estate, and faithful manservant Lee (Lee), who presents as a pidgin-speaking domestic but quickly emerges as the series’ essential heart.

Even more eventually, the series gets to the events of the movie, which suddenly make a lot more sense in this context: We see Adam’s sons Cal (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders) — with Zoe Phillips as Abra, the young woman who comes between them — grappling with a legacy that starts with their father and uncle, but really goes all the way back to Cain (whose Biblical destiny “east of Eden” gives the book/series its name) and Abel.

Kazan and co-showrunner Jeb Stuart offer a generally strict translation of the novel’s plot, even if they’ve cut most of the story related to the Hamilton family, the secondary clan most closely tied to Steinbeck’s own lineage. Much of the dialogue is straight from the page, with only the most minor of augmentations to slightly soften, or at least explain, Pugh’s Cathy and an added interlude to move Lee more properly to the story’s center.

The series’ leaps in time come straight from Steinbeck — and from the Bible itself, where spans of hundreds of years might be rushed through in a list of “begats” and characters or incidents that are foundational to entire religions or schools of spiritual thought might be covered in a few verses.

The pieces tie together by the end, but there are some detours and elisions that, in the moment, are frustrating — none more so than the inevitable disappointment that will come from Netflix promoting the series as a love triangle between the characters played by Pugh, Abbott and Faist, which it most surely is not.

It doesn’t help matters that Abbott is giving a mopey, one-note performance — it’s a pretty good note, but it’s limited and limiting — while Faist makes Charles dangerously exciting. If you go into East of Eden thinking it’s a series shared equally between Abbott and Faist and their characters, I can almost guarantee you’ll be annoyed.

Don’t.

Pugh, in her first extended television role since 2018’s The Little Drummer Girl (or 2021’s Hawkeye, if you want to stretch the definition of “extended”), tears into one of fiction’s great and confounding antagonists, a woman so determined and determinedly wicked that she makes Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair look like a Girl Scout. But Cathy isn’t a villain, even if her voiceover begins with an observation about monsters being born to human parents. She’s a woman who refuses to be limited by the expectations and behaviors of inferior men and, in the process of following her own path, decides, with disarming candor, that she can’t be bothered to adhere to patriarchal morality. Kazan adds a “how she got this way” origin that I don’t think was necessary to spell out explicitly, but it doesn’t ruin the character and doesn’t hinder Pugh.

One of my favorite things about Pugh as an actor is that she doesn’t conceal things. When she’s joyful, it radiates. When she’s sad, every inch of her sobs. When she pouts, it’s floor-to-ceiling pouting. And when she sneers, it can throw whole buildings akimbo. Having Pugh playing a character who is, by her very nature, hesitant to reveal her truth is an interesting choice that puts the onus on everybody around her who doesn’t recognize what is so obvious to viewers. Cathy is scary when she lies, but she’s scarier when she tells the truth, with an unobscured honesty that is purely Pugh-ian. She’s so good that even in the second half of the series, when Cathy ages past the point at which Pugh is convincing, it still works.

Abbott’s hangdog monotonousness as one of the men who can’t recognize what Cathy is leaves East of Eden imbalanced. That’s somewhat by intent, but still somewhat avoidable.

Fortunately, that’s where Hinds and especially Lee come into play.

Kazan hasn’t found a way for Hamilton to really do much of anything — with his family largely cut from the story, he’s a glorified real estate agent who comes and goes but only occasionally gets to be a catalyst — but his gregarious energy is an integral counterpoint to Abbott’s nonstop melancholy.

Lee, who has been so excellent in Jonathan Tropper’s Banshee, Warrior and Your Friends & Neighbors and so underused elsewhere, is the real breakout. On the page, the character is an evasion and subversion of stereotypes, but here he’s both exceptional and exceptionally human, benefited by the added scenes Kazan and Chee bring to the fifth episode. While some viewers will enjoy the love triangles or Cathy’s Talented Mr. Ripley-style rise/descent — an episode featuring guest star Martha Plimpton as a kind-hearted brothel madam is a dark delight — almost all my favorite scenes focus on Lee, including a lovely conversation between Lee and radiant newcomer Phillips, one horrifying autobiographical monologue, and a discussion about Biblical semantics between Lee and Hamilton.

It’s this conversation that restores the Hebrew concept/word of “timshel,” or “thou mayest,” to the story — the purest evocation of the book and the series’ exploration of fate, free will and the mutability of human nature. The conversation and the word itself, which gives the seventh and final episode its title, unlocks the Biblical underpinnings and the complexities governing many of the main characters.

It isn’t inherently cinematic to have characters noodling about Biblical translation. That’s why directors Davis and de Clermont-Tonnerre are always able to turn to the next breathtaking New Zealand vista or carefully framed piece of turn-of-the-century architecture, showcasing a quantity of impeccably lit doorways that will either call to mind John Ford or, more recently, the work of Jane Campion — especially The Power of the Dog, which utilized similar if not identical locations. All gaps in time and momentum can be smoothed over by Laura Karpman’s lush and lavish score.

In translation, Zoe Kazan’s East of Eden loses some of the book’s humor and some of its non-plot breathing room, elements that support and enhance its escalation of tragedy and catharsis. But plenty still remains. This, unlike the 1955 film, feels like it understands why East of Eden is a special text and, thanks to Pugh and Lee, offers plenty of specials elements of its own.