The cast on this one is absurd in hindsight. Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Chris O’Donnell, Ben Affleck, Cole Hauser, Anthony Rapp, three of whom also appeared in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie that same year by the way, just sayin’, and O’Donnell would be back in a prep school blazer a couple of months later for Scent of a Woman. None of them were famous yet, and within five years many of them would become household names.
I believed it. Fraser plays David Greene, a working-class Jewish kid from Scranton who gets a football scholarship to an elite New England prep school in 1955. He’s told to keep his religion to himself, and he does. He wins games, makes friends, dates the right girl, and he fits right in. His classmates genuinely like him, and there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t, because David is likeable and talented and doing everything right. It’s obvious he belongs there, and he quickly earns his place. That little religion thing shoudln’t have mattered, right?
Dick Wolf wrote the screenplay, and by his own account he’d dealt with this kind of thing himself. The director, Robert Mandel, had too, and you can tell as it all feels very real.
The bigotry doesn’t start big, It starts casually, it creeps in slowly, with a joke about Jews or communists, someone using a slur when describing someone. The “I’m not racist, but…” type of preamble. The stuff that gets laughed off because it’s not aimed at anyone in particular. At least not anyone in the room.
So David laughs along, because what else is he going to do?
Nobody in that school thinks of themselves as hateful. They think of themselves as normal, David would be the one with the problem for not finding it funny.
And then someone finds out he’s Jewish, and every bit of that acceptance gets revoked overnight. The boys who were celebrating him at parties are painting swastikas on his bedsheets. His girlfriend dumps him. The school that recruited him because it needed a quarterback has nothing to say. And when a cheating scandal lands in David’s lap instead of the kid who actually did it, the honour code that the institution is so proud of gets turned into a weapon, because it was never really there to protect someone like him.
It’s the old familiar pattern, isn’t it? A community welcomes an outsider for exactly as long as that person is useful and invisible. The moment they become identifiable as something other, the same people who were shaking their hand yesterday will swear they never really belonged. It doesn’t require mustache-twirling villains or corrupt officials. It barely even requires malice. It just needs a group of people who’ve decided that their comfort matters more than someone else’s dignity, and an institution that agrees with them by saying nothing.
Wolf said in 2017 that he never believed he’d see this kind of climate again in his lifetime. -Pop
School Ties arrived on Home Video this week in 1993, after a September 18th, 1992 theatrical release.