The Quality Merchandise label is stamped all over Germinal. Gerard Depardieu, who heads the film's huge cast, is the one French actor with worldwide heft and clout. Director Claude Berri is among France's toniest auteurs and producers. Now he and Gerard Brach have adapted Emile Zola's sprawling indictment of a novel. The result is dispiriting: a minor work on a huge canvas.
For 160 claustrophobic minutes, Berri locks viewers inside Zola's 19th century coal mines, where death by cave-in seems only slightly worse than the 12-hour-a-day life sentences that are the miners' jobs. Aboveground too, everything seems a dark metaphor for...
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