School Ties (1992)

Rotten Tomatoes: 60%

Box Office: 14 million USD

My Rating: 7.5/10

Description: High school senior David Greene (Brendan Fraser) grew up in a Jewish working-class family in Pennsylvania, and is invited to a prep school in Massachusetts with a football scholarship. Before he leaves, his father tells him that he doesn't need to reveal his ethnicity to anyone at school out of fear that his schoolmates will react with hostility. (This is after David gets into a fistfight with an antisemite.) Once David gets to school, he makes friends and becomes the best player on the football team, but soon learns that many people at his new school hold antisemitic beliefs. He falls in love with a girl from another school named Sally (Amy Locane), which angers his classmate Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon), who also likes her. Things take a turn for the worse when David's Jewishness is revealed to his schoolmates.

My Thoughts: Is it actually a good movie or am I, Ridley Donowitz, just desperate for genuine representation? The world may never know, but I have a feeling it's a mixture of the two. School Ties did technically flop at the box office, but I think it captures the experience of not knowing whether or not your friends hate you for who you are really well. (Just to be clear, this isn't sarcasm.) There's one scene near the beginning where David and his new friends are all listening to music and having fun, when one of them casually mentions how someone tried to "Jew him down". The look on David's face was one of the most realistic acting performances I've seen in a while, and I was more than impressed. I felt it in my whole body. It was very obvious that director Robert Mandel was tapping into personal experiences, and he did a fantastic job at it. There are a few racial slurs and the cast is mostly white, with the only Jewish actor being Randall Batinkoff (who only had a minor role as Rip Van Kelt), but it's also important to remember that the story takes place in 1959. (A few of the slurs were a little uncalled for, though.) However, this is a genuinely sweet film that I would recommend to people who are pissed off about not seeing themselves in enough movies (you know who you are).

Best Lines: "You know something? I'm still gonna get into Harvard. And in ten years, no one will remember any of this. But you'll still be a goddamn Jew."

"And you'll still be a prick."