Making a two-hour film out of a 500 page book is tough, sure. But this version stinks. I'm sure someone really thought (Claude Berri?) this would be good. The problem is the film scratches the surface of the world Zola created. An obvious example is the mine, Le Voreux itself, in the beginning is described as a kind of living, breathing, horrific thing that swallows humans by the cartload. The trepidation of Etienne in going down to work is described in the book with such detail that when you watch the film the reality of what horror it must have really been is reduced to a simple look of anxiety on Etienne's face while he comfortably waits to descend. There is no trace of the idea of Le Voreux being a monstrous man-swallower. Missing this thematic point has nothing to do with a film's running length. It's a classic movie rendering of a book, without flavor, without guts, without imagination. The casting is atrocious. Etienne is supposed to be twenty-one years old, this guy looks well into his thirties (he was 40 in 1992). It's an important factor. Gerard Depardieu is fat as Maheu, in the book these poor people were starving to death, skinny to the point of emaciation, yet here is Depardieu looking very well fed. Who said Depardieu was physically perfect for the role? Are you nuts? These people were starving to death. The way they portrayed the poor was so prettied up, the younger sister was hunchbacked by malnutrition in the book but here is a cute healthy looking girl of course, their hair is clean and clothes relatively tidy, they look like modern people dressed up. If they wanted to make it look real, these people would have looked like they were suffering physically, as Zola described them. Malnourished, with bad skin, teeth, etc. Berri or whomever didn't have the guts to really show what they must have looked like, it would have been too extreme. Yet the extremity is the book's central character in a way. Without that, this is garbage. Another example, in the mines, in the book, the characters would have to crawl on their hands and knees to get to the seam in places, in pitch-black darkness at points, and Etienne would have suffered all sorts of bruises and cuts, but in the movie they just stroll on up to the spot. The characters and setting in the movie do no justice to how the book describes things like the temperature, freezing cold one minute and dying of heat the next. There are many examples like this. I had to turn it off. The acting wasn't that good either, not necessarily their fault, when they're forced to generalize things that were compressed and not naturally developed in the film the way they were in the book. Look, of course it's difficult to adapt a book, especially a good book, but if you can't do it, just don't. You're embarrassing yourself. The contrast between the classes in this book and how it completely illuminates their difference make the story make sense. This movie unfortunately doesn't come close. Only stupid 21st/20th Century minds from the Civilized West could actually think the poor characters in the movie were shown realistically as impoverished. We have no idea. That's why you read the book. Make the movie if you have the courage to do it justice. Without showing the real conditions, the desperation of the people to strike doesn't make sense, they have to be willing to die, because they're dying already.
Review of Germinal
