As John Steinbeck wrote it, East of Eden is a sprawling, ambitious, provocative novel, spanning from the Civil War to the end of World War I. Its primary characters include an Irish immigrant family and a Chinese loner, several generations of feuding brothers and an evil and manipulative young girl who matures into an even more evil and manipulative woman. And through it all runs the author's central question: Are we pre-destined to a particular fate and disposition, or can free will overcome?
The movie version, produced in the 1950s and adapted with Steinbeck's input, chopped off the first three-quarters of the book. Director Elia Kazan opens with Cal Trask, one of two very dissimilar brothers, hunting down his mother, who abandoned the family right after her twins were born. Cal and his brother, Aron, are like the biblical Cain and Abel — one is good by nature, the other evil — but in the movie, Cal is played with palpable charisma by James Dean.
The next version of East of Eden arrived in 1981. The six-hour ABC miniseries used the extra time to include more characters and stories neglected in the film. The Hamiltons, the Irish family, are given lots of room to develop, as is Lee, the Chinese caretaker, who is much wiser than he originally appears. Most of all, that miniseries brought the character of Cathy to dead center. As played by Jane Seymour, she was a force of nature — and of pure evil, who, after giving birth to twins she didn't want, would shoot her husband and abandon her babies.
I've revisited these earlier versions to put into a fuller context just what Zoe Kazan has done in revising, and remaking, the story first brought to screen by her grandfather. This new Netflix miniseries, at about seven hours, is slightly longer than the older one — but it basically eliminates the Irish American family, so it can't claim to be more complete. It also can't claim to be the first to focus on the feminist perspective, because the ABC version certainly did that. The new version, though, explores even more fully the transition of Cathy, the young girl, to Kate, the prostitute.
Florence Pugh, as Kate, is given more justification for her actions. She's also given more voice: Instead of Steinbeck providing narration about Kate and her childhood, this new East of Eden has Kate supply it herself. Which she does while listening to a lecture by the man she's about to target.
Pugh's portrayal of Kate, even at the end, is more glamorous than in the previous versions, which showed Kate as older and arthritic. But the drama is unchanged, and many of the confrontation scenes, even ones without violence, are uncomfortably intense. Netflix allows for more sex scenes and nudity, so there's lots of both. But most of these are staged as almost the opposite of erotic: either matter-of-factly, or with one or both parties taking part unwillingly or unenthusiastically. On the night Cathy marries her husband Adam, played by Christopher Abbott, she leaves his bed, and slips into the next room — and into the bed of Adam's brother, Charles, who's understandably startled.
Pugh, like Seymour before her, deserves the spotlight here, and fills it. But watch, also, for Hoon Lee as the family's Chinese manservant and Martha Plimpton as Kate's madam. They're excellent, too. And best of all, this new East of Eden hammers home Steinbeck's primary theme — and suggests, after all the deaths and misery, a potentially happy ending.
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