East of Eden’s Ambition Wins Out

Note: Book-based spoilers for Netflix’s East of Eden ahead.

How could any contemporary adaptation of East of Eden not linger on Cathy? After decades of perspective-shifting literary retellings like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Mists of Avalon and the current trend of feminist Greek myths, Cathy is an enigma begging for some traumatic backstory to staple her flaws together. A murderer and mother who abandons her newborn twins, she is too horrible, a disruption to an orderly cause-and-effect narrative that demands evil come from somewhere. It’s more comfortable and digestible to try to make sense of her, to peg her cruelty to the way she was warped in her early years, to offer some connecting dots that will explain how she got this way.

To some extent, Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden does this. Played with exquisite, improbably expressive steeliness by Florence Pugh, Cathy does not awaken from nowhere as a predator. She is acting in response to the world around her and making the logical decision to seek freedom and independence above all else. She turns to prostitution as the most readily available avenue for self-sufficiency and financial clout, something that won’t require her to submit to a husband or lose herself in motherhood. The series longs to suggest Cathy’s monstrousness is a possibility for anyone, that evil and darkness can exist in any person who does not actively choose goodness; at times, its investment in Cathy’s inner life, her motives, and her early traumas nearly unbalances its pointed consideration of choice and morality. But the apple cart never tips over, and in total, the series is the sort of sweeping intergenerational saga contemporary TV rarely attempts and even more rarely achieves.

Cathy is just one piece of East of Eden’s broader tale of the Trask family, which is caught in a cycle of Cain and Abel–inflected rivalries and resentments. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, veteran Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts) raises his two sons, imprinting on them his weighty expectations for their futures. Charles (Mike Faist) has more courage and stomach for violence; Adam (Christopher Abbott) is gentler and more considerate. But Cyrus chooses paths that reverse these expectations: Adam gets sent off to become a soldier, while Charles remains to run the farm. When they reunite after their father’s death, they try to come to an uneasy peace with the way Cyrus shaped their lives. This is all a backdrop for the real inciting event: Cathy arrives on the Trask family farm nearly beaten to death by a jealous john, and her longing for freedom corrodes the Trask family from within.

An irresolvable knot of wickedness who acts on impulse and has seemingly no capacity for empathy, Cathy stumbles into the heart of the Trask family’s jealousy and ambition. But where John Steinbeck’s novel and the 1955 film made by Kazan’s grandfather Elia Kazan render her as a cipher, the embodiment of an unknowable evil, the Netflix version gives her far more texture and context. The second episode includes extended flashbacks to Cathy’s childhood, in which she was raped as a young girl and gradually learned male attention was a dangerous, powerful force she could manipulate to achieve her own aims. As she heals, Cathy seduces both Trask brothers but marries Adam. She goes with him to California despite her blankly stated objection, gives birth to twins, then abandons them immediately, shooting Adam in the shoulder and fleeing from the isolation and suffocation of his remote Central California ranch.

The trauma of Cathy’s youth is not that different from the story of Adam and Charles, warped by their father’s expectations and the grooves of rivalry carved after years of circling each other. But explaining Cathy inevitably reduces her too. She is less a force of nature. Through several generations of Trask men, East of Eden dramatizes the struggle of choosing to be good. But it cannot seem to land on where this expanded version of Cathy falls into its schema of choice and morality, whether she ever had the capacity to make a choice or how to justify her seemingly superhuman capacity for manipulation and malevolence. The Netflix version of Adam, played by Christopher Abbott, does not offer much as a foil for Cathy, either — he is improbably checked out, astonished by the events of his own life and totally incapable of seeing what’s happening right in front of him.

This East of Eden is a gorgeous production, deliberately stark and vast and dusty rather than lushly floral like the 1955 film. Where it truly excels, however, is in the richness of smaller performances from Martha Plimpton as Faye, the brothel owner who Cathy seduces and destroys; Ciarán Hinds as William Hamilton, the man who helps Adam survive Cathy’s abandonment; and most especially Hoon Lee as the Trask family’s house manager, Lee. Humanizing Cathy oddly makes her seem smaller, and Adam’s goodness feels more like absence than an active choice to do the right thing. But in Zoe Kazan’s version, those diminishments let Lee become the new core of the show’s depiction of purpose and responsibility. An episode in the middle of the series, written by Kazan and novelist Alexander Chee, explores Lee’s life after he decides to leave his caretaking role and pursue his dream of opening a bookstore, and it opens up a world of turn-of-the-century California beyond Steinbeck’s imagination that dovetails beautifully with the world of Cathy and the Trasks.

Unlike Cathy, whose childhood appears in flashback, Lee’s backstory comes out through the character’s explanation of his own memories and his present-day reconsideration of those earlier events. It’s a small but potent difference. While the eye of the camera presents Cathy’s childhood as objective fact, Lee describes and then reframes his understanding of the past as an adult character in scenes Hoon Lee performs with astounding tenderness and pain. The result is that while East of Eden seeks to explain Cathy, it allows Lee the insight and opportunity to explain himself in his own words. Despite the uneasiness in Cathy’s character, the miniseries’ investment in Lee and its enormous, admirable ambition win out in the end, obliterating any of the earlier wobbles. The final moments, the story’s famous articulation of human agency and good versus evil, land with crushing loveliness. The ending’s weight comes from the huge scope of the Trask family’s grief, but even more, its emotional heft comes from how clearly this East of Eden sees Lee, the person who has always understood the things the Trasks are still attempting to learn.