This rearrangement doubles as a statement of purpose. Kazan’s adaptation of the literary classic, overseen in partnership with co-showrunner Jeb Stuart (writer of “Die Hard” and “The Fugitive”), is faithful — arguably even more so than the 1955 film directed by her grandfather Elia, previously the book’s best-known screen version. (The feature zeroes in on the final phase of a multigenerational epic, while this series takes on the whole thing.) But emphases and points of view are rearranged to elevate two characters in particular: Cathy, as indicated by the show’s marketing and advance press, and Lee (Hoon Lee), the Chinese American cook whose added dimensions emerge more gradually. These dual portraits aren’t consistently or equally successful, but combined with a lush production and a stellar cast, they’re a case for bringing Steinbeck’s enduring tale of free will, original sin and cyclical tragedy into the 21st century.
Pugh was an Oscar nominee by her late 20s for her performance in another high-profile adaptation, Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women.” She’s nonetheless spent the last few years without a role quite deserving of her talents. (Getting beamed up into the Marvel machine will do that to a young actor.) Though largely a film star, Pugh had previously done some of her finest work on television, in Korean auteur Park Chan-Wook’s 2018 take on John Le Carré’s “The Little Drummer Girl.” Watching “East of Eden,” which Pugh also executive produced, it’s apparent what called her back to the small screen: In Cathy, she gets a character who’s constantly calculating as her position shifts over decades, from vulnerable girl to reluctant wife to skilled prostitute to grizzled madam. And making hidden depths legible on the surface is some of what Pugh does best. A teenage Cathy arrives, beaten and bloody, on the Connecticut doorstep of half-brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist), whose own psychodrama is already well under way.
Pit against one another by their father Cyrus (Tracy Letts), a Civil War veteran obsessed with molding his sons into a soldier (Adam) and a farmer (Charles) despite either boy’s natural instincts, the Trasks are already in possession of the emotional inheritance they’ll soon pass on to the next generation. But we see them first through Cathy’s eyes, which burn with an animal intelligence even through a mosaic of bruises and scabs. Adam, simple and trusting, is an easy mark for a desperate woman looking for a life raft.
Charles, canny and discerning, is a threat — and maybe a kindred spirit. Pugh is fantastic in these early episodes, which establish Cathy as a kind of psychopath in the clinical sense — a creature of instinct who sees any threat to her agency, from parental discipline to full-blown abuse, as a lethal attack to be repaid with interest. Watching her operate is akin to Scarlett Johansson’s performance as a man-eating alien in the 2013 film “Under the Skin”: Cathy operates less out of malice than an innate, unchangeable essence.
When she likens her marriage to something that “can be slipped out of, like a poorly made knot,” we understand how inimical she is to any kind of constraint, legal or otherwise. That her means of exit is abandoning her newborn twins is less than sympathetic, but in a different era Cathy would have options beyond a domesticity that never suited her in the first place. As the series continues, however, Kazan plays up the explanatory power of an incident from Cathy’s childhood.
If Steinbeck believes monsters are born, Kazan seems to be of the school that they’re made. The origin story helps contextualize the misery and self-isolation of Cathy’s later years, as the madam of a Salinas whorehouse. But it also abates the singular ferocity of her early characterization, and concedes to the viewer’s need to find humanity in her.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
