Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
When David Greene receives a football scholarship to a prestigious prep school in the 1950s, he feels pressure to hide the fact that he is Jewish from his classmates and teachers, fearing that they may be anti-Semitic. He quickly becomes the big man on campus thanks to his football skills, but when his Jewish background is discovered, his worst fears are realized and his friends turn on him with violent threats and public ridicule.
School Ties is a solidly crafted drama with a sincere and important subject — antisemitism in 1950s elite prep school culture — anchored by a cast of then-rising stars including Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. The plot is earnest and well-structured, though it follows a fairly predictable arc of assimilation, exposure, and reckoning. The acting is competent and occasionally impressive given how young the ensemble was, but no single performance is truly transcendent. Cinematography is workmanlike period-appropriate drama without particular visual flair. The ending delivers a moral resolution that feels earned but not especially surprising or ambiguous. Its novelty lies mainly in its subject matter for a mainstream teen drama, though the execution remains conventional in form. A solid, above-average film across the board without standing out in any single category.