East of Eden Returns: Florence Pugh Owns Steinbeck
Her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film.
There is a particular kind of courage in adapting something that already exists perfectly — and Zoe Kazan, writer and driving force behind Netflix's new *East of Eden* series, has done exactly that with full awareness of the weight she was carrying. Her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film. James Dean became a myth inside it. And yet the novel — Steinbeck's longest, most sprawling, most morally tangled work — was never fully on screen until now. The movie took a sliver. Zoe Kazan took the whole thing.
Florence Pugh plays Cathy, which is either the most obvious casting decision of the decade or the most inspired, and the answer turns out to be both simultaneously. Pugh has built a career on performing damage with perfect stillness, and Cathy Ames is the role that architecture was built for. Christopher Abbott is there too, and if you know Abbott's work — the way he makes quiet feel like pressure — you already understand why this cast is generating the kind of conversation that doesn't live and die on a press cycle.
Meanwhile, the 2024 Sundance breakout *Thelma* — the one where June Squibb drove a mobility scooter across Los Angeles to retrieve money from a con man, and it was somehow both funny and genuinely moving — is being remade in Mandarin as *Grandma, Please* by Stars Collective. The original worked because it understood that old women contain multitudes that cinema usually refuses to show. Whether the remake understands the same thing is the only question worth asking.
And then there is Kevin Macdonald, Oscar-winning director, spending two years following Pep Guardiola for Prime Video's *A Beautiful Obsession*. Macdonald's line — that "Pep playing himself is a bit like having Robert De Niro play a football coach" — is either the most flattering comparison in sports documentary history or a quietly devastating observation about the performance of genius. Guardiola is a man who has turned tactical obsession into a kind of aesthetic philosophy, and Macdonald, who made *One Day in September* and *Touching the Void*, is exactly the kind of filmmaker who finds the architecture underneath the spectacle.
Three projects. Three completely different ideas of what a story can carry.
The *East of Eden* series is the one that matters most this season. Zoe Kazan wrote her grandfather's ghost out of the room and replaced it with something rawer. That is not a small thing to do.
