School Ties (1992)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) There’s some heavy-grade irony in seeing School Ties nearly thirty years later and spotting Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck—I’m not sure that anyone would have predicted their respective career path back then. They are easily the best thing about the film, a 1950s-set drama in which a Jewish young man (Fraser) heads to college on a football scholarship but manages to “pass” as non-Jewish until the secret predictably gets out. It’s an old-fashioned tale of anti-Semitic prejudice, and we can almost see every plot turn coming well in advance. If you’re approaching the film thinking that it will have some of that old-fashioned boarding school charm, then you’re looking at the wrong place: School Ties really isn’t one of those “inspiring teachers” kind of film and the lead character faces adversity at every turn in this very WASP-ish environment. There’s some structural oddness here and there, with minor characters popping up and then disappearing—almost as if the original intent of the film was bigger, and got whittled away to the anti-discrimination theme though successive editing. I don’t know. But there’s a limited appeal to School Ties nonetheless—while no one will object to its basic message of decency and anti-discrimination, the film doesn’t do much more than deliver on the essentials, and can’t help (by its predictability) to feel a bit perfunctory about it. It’s not exactly a bad watch, but it could have been better at achieving its own objectives.