For Florence Pugh, and hence inevitable. Her serious roles seem to be thinning out these days. Adapted by Zoe Kazan from John Steinbeck's novel (1952) which I have still not read. She's the granddaughter of Elia Kazan whose adaptation (1955, starring James Dean) I've apparently seen twice to no discernible effect. Also an improbable jag from $9.99 (2008) via Leeanna Walsman who voiced a supermodel there and plays the mother of Flo's character here.
The poster implies Flo's Cathy is central to the whole thing but the actual focus is Adam, played as an adult by Christopher Abbott (A Most Violent Year (2014), Poor Things (2023)). He's mostly inert, often a lettuce, which may have been intentional but was not very satisfying, especially when set against Flo's excellent work. Mike Faist (The Bikeriders (2023)) as his brother Charles fares better. Tracy Letts plays the boys' father in the first episode. General housebody Hoon Lee (very fine) more-or-less anchors the latter half of proceedings with some help from Ciarán Hinds (also good) as a neighbour.
I enjoyed it for the most part. The story started brutally and promised to be less predictable than it ultimately turned out to be. Flo's arc was initially surprising (with some echoes of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955)) then became a railroad heading for an implausibly sentimental expiry. Some plot points were insufficiently motivated — why not ask your wife what she wants? why move from your ranch in the Salinas Valley to a nearby (but not the closest) town? — and I wonder if those were defects of the script or the novel. The general absence of sex from the lives of Lee's and Abbott's characters meant Flo had to shoulder more than her fair share of that burden. Garth Davis directed the first four quite ably; perhaps he just needs a decent screenplay to work from. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed the last three, also fine. But every so often there were scenes that could have been elided (if we've already been shown how it ended we don't really need to be shown how it went) which may've freed up a bit more time for explication. I would have liked to spend more time in San Francisco's Chinatown.
Lucy Mangan at the Guardian. Soapy family drama over three generations. Caroline Darya Framke at the New York Times found new depths in the characterisation of Cathy. Cain and Abel. Rebecca Onion: omits most of the semi-autobiographical material on the Hamilton family, woke, doesn't work. (To me the ghost linked this Cathy to Emily Brontë's; she's haunted by the one man who's simpatico with her deviancies. And of course the whole thing harks back to Flo's bombshell feature debut Lady Macbeth (2016).) Jason Di Rosso and Wenlei Ma at the ABC. And so on and on.
