School Ties

"School Ties" was Brendan Fraser's first dramatic role, and he played it very nicely. It's pretty sad to look back and see that from the years '93 to '97 Fraser appeared only in crap movies, usually bad comedies or films with no plot whatsoever. This was also the first big movie for a few of today's brightest stars, such as Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris O'Donnell.

The film is set in the 50's, where a Jewish boy called David Greene (Brendan Fraser) gets the chance to enter a highly recognized high school, only because he is a great football player. David knows this is his chance to later make it to a big university like Harvard, so he has to make things right this last year of school. At first he fits in nicely, but from the very first day he discovers all of his classmates don't mind making jokes about jews, since none of them is clearly not one; They all come from rich families, and they have to keep up with their family tradition, they must make it into a big time college, so most of those kids are under a lot of pressure.

With David on the football team, the school finally won a championship, which is exactly why he was there for. He quickly becomes the star of the team, and everyone is asking about him, and even the cutest girl, Sally (Amy Locane) has a huge crush on him. But while all of this is happening, he never told a soul about his jewishness. Charlie Dillon (Matt Damon) has been jealous of David ever since he joined, mainly because he would have been the quarterback if David didn't come to the school. After he sees David and Sally, who he always considered 'his girl', he gets pretty angry. Dillon happens to be the first one to accidentally find out David is a Jew, and he waits no time to tell the rest of the class. Soon, lots of Jew-jokes start to be told, and most of the classmates turn against David, calling him a liar and such. About the only one who still talks to him is his roomate Chris Reece (Chris O'Donnel).

David has to deal with all these problems alone, but he's a strong young man and has no intentions of quitting school. The real problem begins when a student cheats in a history test, and the teacher finds out about this. He gives the guilty student a couple of days to confess, or else he'll see himself forced to fail the whole class. The racism among these students is so big, that most of them end up blaming David for the cheating, but he knows he didn't do it, how is he going to deal with this?

As you can see, the story is quite interesting. David claims to have never lied to his mates, he says he had no reason to talk about his religion, since nobody else talked about their religions; But the other boys think being a Jew is different, and he shouldn't have kept it for himself. It must have been horrible for a Jew around that time to be surrounded by people who thought they were garbage, but David was very reasonable, and he kept doing what appears to be the right thing.

This film was greatly done, most of the shots were long/short enough to not bore the audience, and the acting was amazing, all of those young actors did a great job. Besides the Jew matter, the film also shows how much pressure can some kids be under; Some of them were fourth and fifth generation of families who went to Princeton or Harvard or another big University, so they needed to work very hard to keep up their families expectations; This probably happens nowdays still, it's pretty sad actually. I thought this film was great in every way, and I'd recommend it to any kind of audience.

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