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East of Eden<\/em><\/u> debuts on Netflix on October 1.<\/em><\/p>\nGood vs. evil, brotherly rivalries, parental rejection, the notion of free will as opposed to fate\u2026 East of Eden has a lot going on. And the new Netflix iteration<\/u> of the John Steinbeck epic is pretty great at conveying these ideas with a well-acted, handsomely produced, seven-episode miniseries that\u2019s the streaming equivalent of a page-turner.<\/p>\n
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East of Eden Images<\/h3>\n<\/span><\/output><\/p>\n
I confess to having never seen Elia Kazan\u2019s 1955 adaptation of East of Eden in its entirety, despite its status as one of only three starring vehicles for James Dean. But what I do remember about it is mish-mashed in my head with another of his films, Giant, so much so that I was a bit surprised by how this version ended. That may also be in part because, surprisingly, there haven\u2019t been a ton of film or TV adaptations of East of Eden beyond the Kazan\/Dean film; there was a TV miniseries in 1981 starring Jane Seymour, and a long-gestating movie version that had Jennifer Lawrence attached<\/u> at one point but never materialized, but otherwise that\u2019s it.<\/p>\n
And that\u2019s just fine, because now Kazan\u2019s granddaughter, the actress Zoe Kazan, has adapted the 1952 novel for the small screen. Along with directors Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Kazan takes the story and imparts a modern sensibility to what is, after all, an age-old tale. For East of Eden makes no bones about its ultimate source, which is the biblical tale of Cain and Abel. Indeed, the very title comes from the Book of Genesis: \u201cSo Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only in this version of the story, the second Black Widow and the third Professor Xavier star! (Also, a former Ghost Rider villain shows up for a supporting turn.) I\u2019m talking, of course, about Florence Pugh, who really is the centerpiece of this version of the story as Cathy Ames, and Christopher Abbott, who is the second lead as Adam Trask. Mike Faist (Challengers) plays Adam\u2019s brother Charles, who winds up in the middle of things between Cathy and Adam even while the latter two are destined to marry and have children someday. East of Eden is a generational story, as we start Episode 1, \u201cBrothers,\u201d in the post-Civil War Connecticut of 1874 and eventually find our way to California\u2019s Salinas Valley circa World War I in the finale, \u201cTimshel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pugh in particular stands out as the complicated, headstrong, smart, and quite evil Cathy.
\u201c<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n\u201cI believe there are monsters born in this world to human parents,\u201d Pugh\u2019s Cathy tells us in voiceover in the opening line of the series. And that is certainly an idea that lingers over the 46 years or so of the Trask family that we are to bear witness to, though whereas Cathy \u2013 a cruel woman who does unspeakable things to those who love her most \u2013 takes that notion to be incontrovertible, Kazan is less convinced. Cathy may be a monster, but was she born that way or did other monsters turn the once innocent child that she was into one of their own?<\/p>\n
Episode 1 spends a good amount of time with the young versions of Adam (Costa D’Angelo) and his brother Charles (Tom Sweet), as they are forced to run military drills under their father Cyrus (a hateful Tracy Letts), whose heart is still in the war and who plays favorites with his sons. \u201cAdam, don\u2019t you see? I love you better,\u201d Cyrus tells his elder son while Charles is barely within earshot. And yet he has a funny way of showing this affection, choosing to send Adam off to fight in the army while making Charles \u2013 the son who actually has an interest in enlisting \u2013 stay home to mind the farm.<\/p>\n
By the time Cathy comes into the brothers\u2019 lives years later, she\u2019s on death\u2019s doorstep as well as the Trasks\u2019, having been beaten savagely by forces unknown. She will also soon drive a wedge between Adam and Charles, just as their father did, upending all their lives in the years to come, even while that central question will continue to come up: Are monsters born, or are they made?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nHappy family: Mike Faist, Christopher Abbott and Florence Pugh as the Trasks.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/output><\/p>\n
East of Eden constantly raises this idea, and sometimes it\u2019s a bit too on the nose about it. \u201cI want to be good\u201d and similar lines are uttered by characters who we already know are struggling with the choices they\u2019ve made, or are about to make. But then it has moments of sublime exploration of such notions. In particular, the relationship that forms between Hoon Lee\u2019s Lee and Ciar\u00e1n Hinds\u2019 Samuel Hamilton yields a philosophical discussion around the idea of \u201ctimshel\u201d \u2013 a Hebrew word that, according to Steinbeck\u2019s translation, means \u201cthou mayest.\u201d In other words, you may, or you may not. It\u2019s your choice to do good\u2026 or bad.<\/p>\n
Hoon Lee (Your Friends & Neighbors) is a standout in this series, eventually entering the picture as the Chinese manservant of Adam\u2019s household who, despite being American born, is still treated as a lesser by most of the whites who he lives among. His connection to Adam and Adam\u2019s own sons, and how it leads him to reflect on his own life, is both heartwarming and at times sad. Hinds too plays an important and memorable part in the Trask family as Adam and Cathy move out West, while Joseph Zada and Joe Anders eventually join the series as the years progress, playing twin brothers Caleb and Aron, respectively, and effectively continuing the themes of fraternal friction as 20th century counterparts to their father and uncle.<\/p>\n
As for Pugh, Abbott and Faist, the trio are excellent in their roles, with Pugh in particular standing out as the complicated, headstrong, smart, and quite evil Cathy. Though indeed born of human parents as Cathy was, Zoe Kazan\u2019s East of Eden can\u2019t help but contemplate how even a character like this could be the result of more than just fate. \u201cTo a monster, the norm must seem monstrous,\u201d Cathy says in that same VO. But what if that monster had no choice but to become monstrous in order to survive?<\/p>\n
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Read Full Article At Source <\/a>East of Eden debuts on Netflix on October 1. Good vs. evil, brotherly rivalries, parental rejection, the notion of free will as opposed to fate\u2026…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":89403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6608,12928,28],"class_list":["post-89402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech-gadgets-reviews","tag-east","tag-eden","tag-review","wpcat-32-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/89403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}