Do we still read Steinbeck? Never mind that their content still inspires the torch-and-pitchfork set.
“The Pearl” has often been assigned in middle schools, largely because it’s short. Young readers seem to find their own way to “Of Mice and Men,” even if they’re not required to. But “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden”—the latter of which Zoe Kazan has now adapted into a thoroughly absorbing series with an astonishing Florence Pugh—are forbidding tomes, for students and teachers alike.
The more dynamic characters of the ’55 movie are rendered decidedly colorless here. Kazan gives us at the very beginning of episode 2 (of seven total) might be described as a psychological escape hatch: In a scene hazy with sunlight and greenery, a 5-year-old Cathy is lured away from home by an adult male proffering candy. That evil exists—in a theological sense—is something Steinbeck seems to have answered for himself in the person of Cathy, who sleeps with her brother-in-law, tries to abort her sons, abandons them at birth, shoots her husband, Adam, when he won’t let her leave, and takes possession of a whorehouse after killing its madam (a marvelously myopic Martha Plimpton).
The younger Kazan, who developed this project and scripted most of it, has addressed that problem by tackling the entire text, in ways her grandfather couldn’t possibly. And she’s done so in ways that discourage any comparisons with her predecessor. The balance of the new story will disorient anyone trying to mentally dovetail the old version into the new. Lee, the Chinese-American scholar who, in the novel, helps the hapless Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott) raise his sons, was deleted from the movie entirely. But thanks to actor Hoon Lee’s sinewy performance, Lee is restored as the most memorable character in the tale. And she exhibits no remorse. But what Ms. She is then, presumably, sexually abused. This is not in the book. And it provides a moral alibi for a character whose creator never gave her one. Thursday, Netflix
And yet, along the Cannery Row of his Nobel-winning contemporaries—Hemingway, Faulkner, Pearl Buck—John Steinbeck retains a singular and very American claim to fame: his movies. Kazan’s grandfather Elia, was the only James Dean movie that James Dean got to see; his untimely death and posthumous mythology made it a pop-cultural totem. It also happens to be a marvelously made movie, though the elder Kazan focused solely on the fourth and final section of the novel, leaving it not just abridged but a bit adrift.
John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” of 1940 is a perennial on “best ever” lists. And the 1955 “East of Eden,” directed by Ms.
