User Reviews

Prior to catching this German language film, at its US premier showing, I would have considered `German Comedy' to be a contradiction in terms and the very idea of a comedy about testicular cancer seemed best left to the likes of idiots like Tom Green. Instead, this often hilarious, at times moving and always very human tale turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and well-realized films I've seen in this (admittedly) pretty lame year for film releases. The film deals with a promising young man who finds his well-ordered life turned topsy-turvy by a diagnosis of testicular cancer. After a surgery claims one of his `eggs' (the film's German title translates as `The Egg Thieves,' which references German slang for testicles, as well as a term for petty thieves) the main character learns that either more surgery or chemo treatments are needed to give him the best chance for no return of the cancer. He opts, against his controlling mother's and his doctor's advice, for the chemo and begins a lengthy stay in the hospital's chemo ward where he develops a bittersweet romance with a terminal patient and an odd friendship with two other male chemo patients- one an obese, somewhat childlike near-mute and the other an often hostile young man who spends most of his convalescence watching gruesome horror videos. The film takes more than a few swipes at the medical system the patients are trapped within, and the doctors and nurses who run it, but these characters never devolve into total caricature, which would likely happen in most films of this nature. While often the targets of ridicule, the hospital staff is ultimately handled with the same kind of respect the director offers the patients rather than becoming buffoons or cold-hearted monsters. Eventually the trio of patients decides to rebel against the system and, in a truly hilarious sequence, which mirrors dozens of heist films, they set out to reclaim that which has been taken from the protagonist. His testicle.

In many ways, THE FAMILY JEWELS made me think of Robert Altman's MASH. Not that director Schwentke's film has that film's anarchic nature or improvisational style, but it has a similar gift for mining very real and telling humor out of a situation one would expect to be handled with deadly seriousness. Surprisingly, for a foreign film, much of the humor is of a verbal nature but the English translation is very well done and the laughs come through quite naturally. The director also never loses track of his character's humanity, nor the sometimes raw and wrenching emotions that underlie that humanity and the film's humor. You can count on laughing a lot in the course of this film, but a few tears will roll as well, and both tears and guffaws are earned honestly and not by cheap manipulation of the audience. The film's director was in attendance at the film festival I caught this at and he explained during a post-showing Q&A that much of the film was autobiographical in nature, which makes the film all the more impressive. I really only saw this film because I had been very impressed with the directors film TATOO, which I caught at the same festival a year earlier. That film was a very dark and gruesome thriller with more than a hint of horror elements. FAMILY JEWELS could scarcely be more different, but it is every bit as well executed and the combination could mark the German born director as a major new talent. He did share that he's soon to start on a big budget, American action film. I can only hope the experience doesn't beat the freshness of Schwentke's vision out of him.

I had the good fortune of seeing the German comedy `Eierdiebe' (English title: `Family Jewels') at the 2003 Kansas City Film Fest. It was `good fortune' in more ways than one because I was fortunate to get one of the last seats in the theater before the house sold-out. I can't report how `Family Jewels' might `play in Peoria,' but Kansas City is damn near to Peoria, and I can tell you that it grabbed the packed-house from the get-go, and didn't let go until the end credits, when the audience gave it a rousing ovation.

The enthusiasm the audience displayed came as something of a surprise only because the storyline is not exactly an old-fashioned `Andy Hardy' comedy.

Imagine an Andy Hardy comedy (in German with subtitles, at that!) where Andy has his life-turned upside-down when he loses one of his gonads to testicular cancer, then undergoes Chemo, leading to a madcap chase through the nether world of a cancer ward to retrieve his lost `family jewel.' I'm not kidding, all that happens, and more!

Needless to say, `Family Jewels' is a `dark comedy' that goes where few, if any, films have dared to go! (Maybe that's not too surprising, since the filmmaker, Robert Schwentke, also made the critically praised `Tattoo' -- one of the darkest `noir killer-thrillers' around - "Tattoo" raised the stakes of `Seven' to eights and nines.)

With `Family Jewels,' Schwentke is in an equally dark place, but in a decidedly more light-hearted mood. Perhaps that's because (according to the program notes handed out at the Festival) the film is `semi-autobiographical -- Mr. Schwentke has indeed prevailed over testicular cancer.

In any event, a potentially `exploitive' subject that could have been played for crude laughs becomes an uproariously funny, but always life-affirming testament to the human spirit.

I think it was the film's affirmation of life that won over the Midwestern audience. In less capable hands, the story could have easily been an example of `gross-out' humor, but instead, it manages the nearly impossible task of looking death square in the eye, and letting go a big wad of spit!

In the Middle Ages, such `spiting in the face of death' was called `Easter Laughter" and I think that's what the Kansas City audience was cheering.

Yeah, they laughed a lot at the gallows humor, but even more, the film gave the audience the chance to join Schwentke's in his own `Easter Laugh' in the face of our common mortality without pandering to either Pollyanna optimism, or giving into a mean-spirited, bitter irony? In that, Schwentke is closer to Camus and Marcel, than to Sartre. (Since Schwentke is a German filmmaker, it's probably saying something that I was more reminded of the French existentialists than their Teutonic cohorts.)

With `Tattoo,' Schwentke proved he could make dark thrillers with the best of the `shock-meisters.' With `Family Jewels' he reveals himself to be even more in- tune to the humanist film tradition of Jean Renoir, DeSica, and Truffaut.

Well, it would be exaggerated praise to compare `Family Jewels' to, say, `Grand Illusion' or `Bicycle Thief' -- thought the film invites some comparisons to both. The cancer ward is not unlike a `prisoner-of-war' camp where categories such as race, class, and gender prove to be foolish "illusions." And the sense of loss of our hero's "family jewel," and his determination to recover that loss, did reminded me (however perversely) of `The Bicycle Thief" -- Schwentke's film is, most of all -- and in the profoundest sense -- a deeply felt film about `loss.'

If Schwentke's film brings to mind the great "humanist" filmmakers, it's in the small moments of the film, when he extends a scene a few seconds beyond the `usual' conclusion to add an unexpected `grace note' - as when a seemingly hard-as-nails doctor or nurse, who've appeared to be Nurse Ratched-like stock- characters, display (out-of-sight of their cancer patients) the grief-process they have come to hide, but always live with -- or in the extended camera time the filmmaker gives to the hero's hopelessly bourgeois mother and father who appears incapable of communicating any sense of the enormity of the situation. But then, Swekenke holds his camera steady a second longer than we expect, to capture their private, silent screams, and unvoiced prayers.

It's quite a remarkable movie. I hope you get to see it. It's a `jewel' to be treasured.

FAMILY JEWELS, which showed at Filmfest Kansas City on September 6, is an uproarious black comedy based on director and writer Robert Schwentke's bout with testicular cancer. With a M.A.S.H.-like irreverence for the medical profession, Schwentke attacks the taboos of death, balls, and cancer, with a deft absurdist touch. The Clash-inspired original soundtrack sets the tone. The film takes place almost entirely in a Berlin hospital, and is stylishly shot in bluish tones. It focuses on the main character's attempt to retrieve his post-op cancerous testicle. The heist is carried out by three twenty-something bald men attached to their rolling chemo-dispensers. The director uses auxiliary sound to great effect, from the snap of the doctor's latex gloves, the drip of the chemo drugs, or the screams of the horror videos preferred by the protagonists' roommates.

Schwentke is able to draw out amazing performances from his actors, particularly the main character, whose face registers dismay, fear, disgust and will-sometimes in a single shot.

Perhaps because it is autobiographical, the film shows great wisdom in how family members react to news of a life-threatening illness. The film finds humanity in the hero's refusal to let disease define him, and in the connections he forms with a waif-like female cancer victim and his two hospital roommates.

Not for the squeamish, the film is graphic but tasteful. And while the medical treatment seems-thank goodness-quite dated, the humor and characters are not.