It is rarely difficult to distinguish between a John Steinbeck novel and a ray of sunshine. The new adaptation of his 1952 book East of Eden doesn’t buck the trend and wastes no time plunging us into the murk. The opening scene follows a beaten, bloodied woman as she crawls across a muddy field towards the only house for miles around.
Out of the house come two brothers. One rushes to rescue her. The other takes one look and announces: “This is a mistake.” Brother, you have no idea.
The rescuer is Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott), the sceptic Charles (Mike Faist). Cut back 25 years to watch them being raised in misery in an essentially motherless household by their monstrous father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts), a civil war veteran and ceaseless recounter of his heroics therein. Charles longs to follow in his footsteps.
Adam is beaten for his lack of aggressive instinct. But it is Adam whom Cyrus sends to enlist and Charles he forces to stay behind and work on the family farm. But years later, Dad is dead, leaving behind an almost certainly ill-gotten fortune.
Adam comes home; the brothers put the past behind them and begin to carve out a decent life on the farm. And then comes Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), the battered, bloodied woman crawling across the field to damn them all. East of Eden was Steinbeck’s penultimate major work; he thought it his finest.
They thought its examination of good and evil – whether we are born to be one or the other, whether we have a choice, how much we can fight our instincts – was heavy-handed and the author guilty of an intrusive moralism that prevented the book from ringing true. The public, however, took it to heart as a soapy family drama – Cain and Abel, but out west and set over three generations. Perhaps this was not what Steinbeck intended, but it made the novel an instant bestseller.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
