East of Eden Netflix series: Florence Pugh reclaims firebrand villain in handsome John Steinbeck adaptation

Before he died, James Dean shot three monumental films that would go on to be in the annals of American cinema history.

One of them was East of Eden, the only one to be released before his death at the age of 24 in 1955. As Caleb Trask, Dean’s performance emphasised the shame he felt as the “bad” son, full of anguish he may have inherited that wickedness from the mother he never knew, Cathy Ames, one of American literature’s most despised villains.

Family legacy is even more central to this new adaptation of John Steinbeck’s opus, this time as a seven-part miniseries.

The writer and showrunner, Zoe Kazan, has her own dynastic burdens to contend with. Her grandfather, controversial Hollywood legend Elia Kazan directed the Dean version more than 70 years ago.

Elia Kazan’s legacy in the industry is a mixed one, as evidenced by the many stars who remained seated, frowning, during his Oscars lifetime achievement award in 1999. He is remembered for classics such as A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront, but he has never escaped the stink of naming names to HUAC during McCarthyism.

When Zoe Kazan was asked about this in 2020 during a press tour for a different project, she brought up East of Eden (she was already adapting it at that time, but in secret).

There’s a Hebrew word, timshel, that Steinbeck incorporated in the book as one of its thematic tenets, which the writer translated to mean “thou mayest”, and which Kazan interprets as making a choice to live a different life than your legacy.

That philosophy is coursing through her version of East of Eden, a lush and handsome adaptation which boasts fantastic performances, and which feels fundamentally different to her grandfather’s film.

For one, the younger Kazan takes Steinbeck’s whole novel and weaves a multigenerational story, while the 1955 version adapted only the final act. The series also expands on the backstory of its older characters, most notably Cathy.

It’s not a feminist reclaiming a la Maleficent per se, but giving her more context, spending more time with her, does make her a more complex character, rather than a one-dimensional evil being who abandoned her newborn babies so she could plot to be the madam of a brothel.

That character is made all the more layered in the hands of Florence Pugh, one of her generation’s greatest acting talents. There’s a throughline from Pugh’s break out performance in the 2016 drama Lady Macbeth to here, playing these young women who pushes against the constraints in their lives.

In this version, Cathy is not more sympathetic – she still cheats, steals, poisons and kills, starting from the time she was a teen – but she is afforded empathy from Kazan and Pugh. That makes her far more compelling as a firebrand character.

Cathy has been chaffing against people, especially men, who seeks to control her, and perhaps it’s that very quality, shame, which would haunt her son Caleb, that she does not possess.

We also discover the histories of her husband Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott) and his brother Charles (Mike Faist), who are manipulated by their overbearing father Cyrus (Tracy Letts), unable to quite escape the legacy of his terrible parenting.

Adam and Charles are the first generation Abel and Cain, and Adam and Cathy’s twins Aron (Joe Anders) and Caleb (Joseph Zada) would be the next.

Steinbeck’s evocation of the biblical myth, by Kazan’s reckoning, is the history of America, with the crimes and betrayals committed by its people against each other. Can the Trasks – and America – reach a moment of timshel?

The series renews focus on Lee (Hoon Lee), the Trasks’ Chinese-American servant who was excised from the 1955 film. Lee is a real presence in this version and his quiet influence on the Trask twins would be, eventually, even more profound than their father’s.

The cast also includes Ciaran Hinds as the Irish immigrant Samuel Hamilton and Martha Plimpton as Faye, the kindly brothel owner who Cathy meets.

Directed by Garth Davis (episodes one to four) and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (episodes five to seven), there’s a lot to admire about this series, even if expanding the aperture to centralise Cathy means diluting the potency of the Cain and Abel analogy.

By keeping intact and deepening the Steinbeck’s novel, it feels like a proper epic with scale and ambition.

East of Eden is streaming on Netflix