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Netflix’s East Of Eden Has No Knowledge Of Good And Evil

The problem with Kazan’s East of Eden is that it tries to understand evil without first understanding goodness.

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“There’s a part of you missing,” East of Eden’s hapless patriarch Adam Trask tells his estranged wife, Cathy, years after she abandoned their infant twins, shot her husband in the shoulder, and ran off to manage a brothel.

“You know about the ugliness in people,” he says. “But you — yes, that’s right — you don’t know about the rest … you don’t believe those men could have goodness and beauty in them. … I think you are only a part of a human.”

In like fashion, Zoe Kazan’s adaptation of the classic novel for Netflix is only a part of a story.

Kazan and Florence Pugh, who plays the role of executive producer as well as Cathy Trask, approached the story intent on drawing more attention — and more sympathy — to Cathy’s character. John Steinbeck’s Cathy is pure, conniving evil, contrasted with Adam, to whom evil is so foreign he cannot recognize it in his own wife. The late-arriving protagonist of the story is Adam’s son, Cal, representing the biblical Cain, faced with the presence of both good and evil in his heart and in his blood. If Cathy isn’t evil, the story doesn’t work.

As she indicated in interviews before the series’ release, Kazan changed Cathy’s backstory to help explain away her sinful choices. Pugh gave soundbites about how she hoped viewers would “sympathize and maybe fall in love with [Cathy] a little bit.” Fortunately for Steinbeck, the effort falls mostly flat. With a vaguely sinister air, Pugh is a perfect casting precisely because of her knack for making audiences despise and distrust her,........

© The Federalist