Florence Pugh and Zoe Kazan are hustling East of Eden as hard as you might expect. I haven’t seen any reviews yet even though it comes out today (must be a tight embargo?), but ironically the Internet’s advance concerns about it come from this exact publicity blitz. They’re rooted in a lot of what Pugh is saying about going deep on whether Cathy is actually truly evil, whether she can make us feel for her, and whether this adaptation might be trying to put a We Need To Understand the Journey of Women spin on a character even though it sure seems like the whole point is that she’s unquestionably bad. I can understand an actor finding it easier to play a rotten soul if they can latch onto SOMETHING — but that necessarily going to show up in the narrative? Is she just talking about her process, or the scripts? We’ll see.
