Although John Steinbeck had already been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature when he published East of Eden, in 1952, what would become one of his final novels is for many (it was for him as well) his best work. In 1955, Elia Kazan brought to the big screen the latter part of his friend’s work, with James Dean playing one of the protagonists. And now, seventy-one years later, the director’s granddaughter, Zoe Kazan, has adapted the Trask family story to turn it into a miniseries and to make its female protagonist her narrator.
The creative license shifts the weight of the novel onto the character Cathy Ames, a woman who arrives in the lives of brothers Adam and Charles in the middle of the night, crawling on the ground and bloodied. This is the starting point of the miniseries that just premiered on Netflix and which, across 7 episodes, will span from 1874 to World War I. Three generations of the Trask family to talk about good and evil, about the influence that family legacy has on individuals, about love and also of hatred. In short, about the lives of people who see circumstances crossing their path that mark them forever.
With Florence Pugh (Little Women, Oppenheimer) in the role of Cathy Ames, Christopher Abbott (Girls) and Mike Faist (West Side Story, Rivals) as the adult brothers Adam and Charles Trask, East of Eden arrives on the streaming catalog with the intention of becoming one of the season’s productions that has just begun.
From the Novel to the Screen
If in the original work the narrator is, at first, the author himself, in Zoe Kazan’s adaptation it will be Cathy Ames who is in charge of telling us her story and that of the Trasks. A decision that dispenses with the biographical connection of the author to the place where much of the story unfolds, the Salinas Valley in California, and to some of the characters that appear in it, but that brings a novel and interesting perspective to audiovisual fiction. Because if there is one thing about Cathy Ames’s character, it is evil.
Florence Pugh como Cathy Ames en una imagen de la miniserie Al este del Edén.
“For a monster, the normal thing is to be monstrous,” Ames reveals at the start of Netflix’s miniseries. The development of this trait that marks the Florence Pugh character is slow to arrive and does not come until the second episode, with the first dedicating itself to telling the story of the Trasks, who are the true focus of the original work. And it begins in 1874, with Cyrus Trask raising his children with severity after having to leave the army after being wounded in the Civil War.
He was the one who planted the seed of the rivalry between his two sons, Adam, the elder, son of a woman who at the start of the narration has already died, and Charles, the offspring he has with his second wife. And although in their childhood they manage to feel compassion for one another when punished, when the seed germinates and blossoms, it develops hate and resentment, irreparably separating them until the moment comes when the rancor no longer makes sense. And it is then that Ames arrives in their lives.
The Paths of Evil
Born in a small town in Massachusetts, the character that earned Jo Van Fleet an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Kazan’s film could make Pugh one of the season’s award stars. Because the double personality that marks her existence and that makes her as dangerous as she is unpredictable is something the British actress has already shown she handles to perfection, and once you meet the woman born from Steinbeck’s pen, it’s hard to imagine another actress playing her.
En el centro, Christopper Abbott como Adam Trask en una imagen de la miniserie Al este del Edén.
It is that ability to show a sweet face and an innocent appearance, yet carry out evil deeds, that imbues all who know her and will be a constant in her life. The most important question the novel raises is whether that evil is able to spread along the family tree, whether it extends like a virus to destroy everything, both within the institution that is the family and outside, with all that surrounds it.
Steinbeck’s novel is a story that, despite its more than 600 pages, manages to keep the reader glued both by its substance and its form. The adaptation Zoe Kazan has crafted has intensified its malevolent component through Cathy, but the astonishing story of Adam and the characters around him will turn Netflix’s miniseries into one of the season’s best productions. We have no proof, nor doubts, but perhaps it will return some dignity to the Emmy-winning category of miniseries.
