classicalsteve
We all have secrets, most often the concealing of a minor infraction. However, what if the secret concerns someone's identity or ethnicity among his or her peers? If the secret was revealed, would his opportunities be jeopardized? This is the plight David Green (Brendan Fraser in a fine performance) must face in "School Ties". In the 1950's, a prestigious college prep school, St. Matthews (modeled probably on Exeter Academy in New England) has been losing football games year after year, and the alumni is at their wits' ends. The alumni concoct an interesting strategy: put together a football scholarship and use it to compel an outstanding athlete to enroll in their school and improve their team.They find a crack-jack quarterback from Scranton, Pennsylvania, David Green, and compel him to attend their school for his senior year of high school. However, there's one catch: Green is Jewish, and St. Matthews is a private Anglican school where students are required to attend Christian services. Green decides to conceal his Jewish heritage and "play" along by attending services and hiding a Star of David necklace. He makes friends, and as the new quarterback, the football team becomes a success.However, Green's appearance at the school causes disruption in the tried-and-true storytelling device of "a stranger comes to town". He has knocked Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon in an outstanding supporting performance) out of the quarterback spot, and the latter will now play running back and blocker. Green becomes the star player. In one interesting scene, Dillon makes the crucial difference in a score but Green receives most of the credit. However, things continue to get worse for Dillon. His "girlfriend" Sally Wheeler (Amy Locane) begins to fall for Green at a school dance.Dillon has only one trump card to play against Green to undermine the latter's meteoric rise to the heights of school super-stardom, potentially the turning point of the story. A thoroughly compelling film from beginning to fade out. The cast is excellent with many young actors who will become name talent in their own right: Fraser, Damon, Ben Affleck, and Chris O'Donnell. And the story asks the question: will ethnic prejudice or individual character win the day?
ibpiar
Main parts of the movie are not believable. If Matt Damon wasn't angry at Brendan Fraser for taking his girlfriend, would he tell classmates that David was Jewish? David helped them win. So, it's not clear at all. The headmaster, the coach, a few alumni knew that David was Jewish. They decided to enroll David. If kids don't like it, too bad. My favorite part is when David puts Magen David back on after kids find out he is Jewish. It's a great lesson. Don't try to blend in. Whenever Jews try to blend in, eventually they suffer. Obviously, it's hard for a high school senior to understand. Especially, when there are so many incentives to do so.
sol-
Given a scholarship to an exclusive protestant boarding school in desperate need of a star quarterback, a Jewish athlete is instructed to conceal his religion with grave consequences in this drama set during the 1950s. Brendan Fraser provides an earnest turn as the internally conflicted young man in question, however, the movie takes an inordinate amount of time to warm up. The main dynamic driving the film, after all, is how all of Fraser's peers react after inevitably finding out the truth, and yet this does not occur until around halfway in with little else driving the plot. A fascinating subplot involves Zeljko Ivanek as a pedantic French teacher who causes one of Fraser's peers to have a mental breakdown. There are also some memorable dialogue exchanges as the students discuss the pressures and expectations placed upon them. Additionally, there is a curious dynamic at play with the school "using" Fraser for football and Fraser in turn using the school as a platform for college. That said, the vast majority of the film revolves around anti-Semitism, which is unfortunately never quite as interesting as kids cracking under pressure or a school manipulating its students. The anti-Semitism angles is not totally uninteresting though, especially as the boys discuss how few Jews they have actually known and come to realise that a lot of the stereotypes they have come to know might just be stereotypes, but the film could have easily been about so much more. Fraser is really good in any case, and same goes for Matt Damon as the student who most aggressively antagonises him.
gimlet_eye
I think it's a mistake to judge this film as a message film. It's not essentially about anti-Semitism, still less about prep schools. What adolescent male peer group isn't riddled with prejudice of one kind or another, absorbed unthinkingly from adult society, and even without such baggage, what young male peer group isn't prone to creating invidious distinctions of its own between the "in" group and the dweebs or nerds or whatever? Or even to hounding those who are hopelessly different? As for the school administration, give them credit for doing their best precisely to promote fair-mindedness and individual moral responsibility on the part of their charges. And note that in the end the honor system, and the school's way of handling it, worked, although not, perhaps, in the way it was expected to.This film is best compared, not with such focused anti-semitic message movies as Gentleman's Agreement, but with the likes of 12 Angry Men, which is a film about prejudice all right, but about as many kinds of prejudice as there are jury members. If this film falls short of 12 Angry Men as a film about prejudice (and it does - I give 12 Angry Men all 10 stars) it is because its subjects are partially formed boys and not men, and one might say the same about the actors, although both individually and ensemble they did a superlative job given their inexperience.Both these excellent films are about people and how they handle prejudicial baggage, both as individuals and as a group, and their merit as dramas doesn't depend on any particular messages, if there are any. One comes away from both films uplifted. In 12 Angry Men, despite all the ranting, and the ugliness, it appears at the end that justice has probably been done, and the judicial system shown to have worked (a view that today seems quaint and nostalgic). In School Ties, you can bet that many of the boys who have gone through the climactic ordeal have been broadened and improved by it, even as others will never change - they will just harden into the attitudes of their peer group, and their class. That's human nature.Arguably the boy who has been most broadened and improved by it is David Greene himself: he has learned to recognize and to stand up manfully to the prejudice he will be encountering in adult life as he makes his way up in the world. Sadly, he has also acquired chip-on-the-shoulder prejudices of his own, as he ungraciously rejects the chastened and conciliatory overtures of the headmaster and the school chaplain. But that too is human nature, and the way of the world.Just a few final personal comments. I matriculated at just such an elite prep school in 1954; in fact Middlesex School, where much of the film was shot, was our chief sports rival. I only attended the one school, so I hesitate to comment on the typicality of the fictional school in the movie, but I suppose that each school had (and has) its own character - although in the 1950s and 1960s, all drew the majority of their students from the same narrow socioeconomic pool. Still, our school was most definitely open to boys of varied social and economic backgrounds (provided their aptitude test scores were exceptionally high) and it has become much more liberal since (not to mention coeducational), so to regard these schools generically as hotbeds of prejudice or snobbery would be to embrace a stereotype no less invidious than the ones invoked in the film.In fact, having spent five years at my school, I graduated from it still unaware of the specific religious backgrounds of any of my fellow students, and even (so naive were we then) with no awareness that certain students, viewed in retrospect, were undoubtedly gay. Somehow, even though the school was denominational and Protestant, and chapel attendance was required, not three times a week, but "every day and twice on Sundays", all but the main Sunday service contrived to be non- denominational, and the school's evident aim was to foster spirituality in general, and moral behavior in particular. I believe there were a number of Catholics, and a few Jews, who sometimes attended their own denominational Sabbath services in town, and there were a few students of other races and nationalities (and I'm sure no quotas), but such prejudice as there was turned more on class than on religion or ethnicity or race, per se.There was, in my day, a subtle distinction between the boys of old money and "good family" who had contributed many of their sons to the place over generations (not to mention money to the endowment fund), and the rest of us who were there to make it (perhaps with scholarship aid), sink or swim, on our own - like David Greene. But the school administration, and the masters, took particular pains to eradicate such attitudes, or at least to balance them with a high sense of noblesse oblige, in just the way this was articulated in the fictional headmaster's chapel invocation. And I must say that I have encountered far more, and more injurious, prejudice of all kinds in real life than I ever experienced at the school, which as an institution endeavored always to stand for something better, and genuinely seemed to care at least as much about the character of the young men it turned out, as about their academic attainments and the colleges they got into.
