Rent School Ties (1992)

Blazers, Belonging and “You People” - School Ties review by griggs

Elite school, spotless blazers, impeccable manners — and antisemitism sitting underneath the whole thing like rot beneath varnish. School Ties is set in the 1950s, made in 1992, and still a bit too recognisable for comfort.

Brendan Fraser is excellent here — confident, funny, talented, which makes it sting when his own teammates start freezing him out. Matt Damon's Charlie is entitlement doing a passable impression of insecurity, and the supporting cast now looks faintly ridiculous: Affleck, O'Donnell, Hauser, with enough future star power to light the playing field.

The film's smartest idea is one it almost undersells. David Greene never lies about being Jewish; he simply doesn't announce it. Why should he? Nobody asks the Methodist, Lutheran, Catholic or Protestant boys to declare themselves. Yet once his Judaism becomes known, his privacy is rebranded as deception. "You people" does an awful lot of damage in two words, turning David from a person into a category the instant prejudice needs one.

There's an odd blind spot sitting behind the film, too: it's a story about the cost of being Jewish in a deeply antisemitic world, and the actor carrying that burden isn't Jewish himself. Fraser's terrific in the part, no complaints there, but the casting slightly undercuts the point the film's trying to make, and nobody involved seems to have clocked it.

The jury-room finale is still the weak link — a sudden lurch into 12 Angry Men just when the film should be trusting everything it's already shown us. It's schematic where the rest of the film is instinctive, and you can feel it reaching for a tidy ending it hasn't quite earned.

The uniforms belong to the 1950s, the film to the 1990s. Far too much of the behaviour belongs to now. A solid, affecting drama — just not quite the great one its subject deserves.