Zoe Kazan’s Heady and Bighearted “East of Eden”

Early in Netflix’s heady new adaptation of “East of Eden,” two young half brothers are set on a course of lifelong competition by their father. Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts), a Civil War veteran, runs military drills with his preteen sons, Adam and Charles, on their Connecticut farm, until a show of solidarity interrupts the training: one of the boys helps the other load a rifle. Cyrus quickly canes them both—the softer Adam for needing assistance, the defter Charles for providing it. When the children bring Cyrus birthday gifts, he doesn’t bother to hide his preference for Adam’s puppy over Charles’s knife, in an echo of God’s partiality to Abel’s offerings over his brother Cain’s in the Old Testament. Envy drove Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, to kill Abel—the Bible’s first murder. But Cyrus, who demands absolute devotion from the boys, is too solipsistic to consider how the rivalry that he stokes will warp his sons’ relationship with each other.

Unfit parenthood begets multiple generations of Cains and Abels in John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden,” the 1952 novel that the author regarded as his magnum opus. Yet the melodrama of the Trask men—and the misfortune of the women who come into their lives—has seldom been brought to the screen, most likely because of the challenges posed by the saga’s narrative sprawl. The director Elia Kazan took a stab, in 1955, by retooling just the final chapters as an angsty star vehicle for the teen heartthrob James Dean. The result was as disjointed as it sounds.

The latest “East of Eden,” a seven-part miniseries, is created by Zoe Kazan, Elia’s granddaughter. Her version is more ambitious and similarly uneven: glossy and unsubtle, yet full of surprises and suspense. It’s also a feat of translation that whittles the book down to its core components while expanding the elements that lend themselves most readily to prestige-television tropes: family dysfunction, feminist revisionism, humanizing detours into the worlds of the characters of color. Kazan dutifully dramatizes the resentments that fester among the Trask men until they explode in violence—though this dynamic, tremendously affecting with the earlier generation, hits diminishing returns when it reappears among their children. But Kazan’s curiosity about two figures given short shrift by Steinbeck—Cathy (Florence Pugh), Adam’s eventual wife and the show’s narrator, and Lee (Hoon Lee), Adam’s self-possessed Chinese American servant—stamps the show with her bigheartedness.

“East of Eden” gestures toward grandness in scope and theme, offering an allegory of the moral corruption of a nation, seen through the rise and fall of one family. (Another story line in the novel, about a large Irish clan, has been mostly excised.) The narrative stretches from the aftermath of the Civil War to the First World War—conflicts that, for the Trasks, are opportunities for profiteering. Cyrus, who becomes an administrator of veterans’ benefits, leaves his sons such large sums that Charles (Mike Faist) concludes that the old man must have raided his agency’s funds. Adam (Christopher Abbott), who turns a blind eye to the source of his inheritance, uses the money to move with his bride, Cathy, from stony New England to a ranch in California, where crops are said to grow so fast that “you have to plant and stand back so you don’t get knocked over.” But the fecundity of the land is no match for the Trasks’ failure to flourish.

These epic strokes rarely stir the heart. The show thrives instead in the interpersonal details, particularly in the many small hurts that develop into injuries to the soul. Letts makes the most of his brief screen time as a manipulator whose petty genius lies in creating an artificial scarcity for his affections. Adam and Charles’s shared fear that they are their father’s second choice curdles into rage at one another—a schism made permanent after the arrival of Cathy.

Tiny and blond with rounded, cherubic features, Pugh’s Cathy lands at their doorstep one night like an angel that crashed to the earth, her skull cracked and her dress drenched in blood. It’s a gothic entrance for a gothic character, and her presence provides the drama with a pulpy propulsion that cuts through the self-seriousness of most of the male-centric plotlines. Cathy becomes the black sun around which the series rotates, in command of an irrepressible will to power that makes her a villain you can’t help but root for.

Her backstory emerges in the second episode—a strong contender for the best hour of television this year—in which we meet her as a cynical Lolita, testing the control she can wield over men with glances and pouts, and incurring the wrath of her disdainful father. When she flees her home—an elaborate escape in which she fakes her own disappearance—she leaves a trail of bodies behind her. Despite her gilded upbringing, which would have put a prosperous union well within reach, she pursues the sex trade before her marriage to Adam, and is driven to return to it after the birth of their twin sons. She abandons the infants without a shred of sentimentality, dryly suggesting to her husband on her way out the door that he throw them down a well. The only thing that matters to her, she says in voice-over, is her freedom—and, barring the convenient death of a wealthy relative, a woman can achieve true self-determination only as a madam. By the time Cathy, in a nearby town, runs her own brothel—known as “the most vicious and depraved in this whole end of the country,” according to Adam’s friend, Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds)—she cloaks herself in the sable-laced finery of a vampire queen.

Steinbeck’s Cains and Abels were made by nurture, whereas his Cathy, the novel’s Eve, illustrates the flukes of nature that can inflict a “malformed soul” upon any family. Kazan presents a more sympathetic spin on the character: a woman ahead of her time who, without the strictures of her era, might not have needed to act so fiendishly to get what she wanted. Despite the ruthlessness of Cathy’s tactics—poison, arson, blackmail—she proves irresistible, because hardly anyone considers her capable of such evil, choosing to see her as a mender of socks or an embroiderer of handkerchiefs who will uncomplainingly fulfill their innermost longings. Pugh’s performance is a master class in physicality and flair, one of her career bests. She makes Cathy unpredictable without sacrificing the character’s psychological transparency, and even her quietest scenes boast the tension of a coiled snake.

There is some danger in this. Cathy’s gravitational pull is such that the further the miniseries veers from her, the more it tends to plod. After Cathy’s departure, the ranch’s saving grace is Lee, who effectively becomes the primary parent of the Trask twins, Cal and Aron. Kazan alludes to but skims over the historical circumstances that restrict Lee’s possibilities for a complete life: in the late nineteenth century, anti-miscegenation laws and an entry ban on Chinese women conspired to prevent Chinese laborers from marrying or starting families. Lee, who arrives at the Trasks’ homestead speaking pidgin and wearing his hair in a queue, is revealed to be a rare Chinese American, having been born to railroad workers, his mother in the guise of a man. Among the Trasks, Lee finds the closest thing he has to a family, wresting back dignity from the world through decency and a wry wit. But, in a breakthrough performance, Hoon Lee never lets the viewer forget the heavy toll exacted by his character’s spiritual homelessness.

Lee’s efforts to break the cycle of paternal negligence for the sake of Cal and Aron (played as teen-agers by Joseph Zada and Joe Anders) become one of the few sources of emotional resonance in the weaker later episodes, which draw the boys into Cathy’s dark orbit. “East of Eden” rushes the brothers’ coming of age, and the relative wholesomeness of their adolescent troubles ushers in a fresh breeze that ends up strangely off-putting. I found it far preferable to soak up the stagnant air in Cathy’s room at the brothel, where she schemes to increase her sway over the town while falling victim to a morphine addiction precipitated by that first bloody night. Even in her grimy decline, there’s no one else whose company we’d rather keep. Shut off to the revelries outside her door, she elects to speak to the dead, who alone can see the fullness of all that she endured, and all that she’d dared to be. ♦