Matt Damon Is A Racist Preppie In This Underrated Drama, Now Streaming
Matt Damon stars in School Ties as a terrible racist student.
Matt Damon might be an A-list actor who just opened up a production company with his bestie, Ben Affleck, but fans of the Good Will Hunting star might have forgotten that five years before his breakout role, Damon played a racist preppie in the underrated drama School Ties. And, if it’s been a while and you’re looking to rewatch this period classic, Just Watch shows that it is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.
The year is 1959, and a star quarterback from a working-class family named David Greene (played by Brendan Fraser) gets the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to a New England preparatory boarding school, but once he’s there, he decides to hide the fact that he’s Jewish from his Evangelical Christian classmates who hold blatant prejudices against his religion. When David’s secret is outed by a drunk teacher, a jealous student named Dillon (Matt Damon) begins to harass and bully David while simultaneously turning the whole school against him.
School Ties was released in 1992 and was one of two films that helped Brendan Fraser break out as an actor in Hollywood, the other film being the Valley comedy Encino Man. While Matt Damon played the antagonist in the movie, School Ties wasn’t considered a breakout role for him. Instead, Damon would get his big break five years later after starring in The Rainmaker and Good Will Hunting in 1997.
In addition to Brendan Fraser and Matt Damon, School Ties also starred Chris O’Donnell as Chris Reese, Randall Batinkoff as Kip Van Kelt, and Cole Hauser as Jack Conners. During the early 90s, Damon and Affleck lived together as roommates and tried to make it in Hollywood. As best friends with similar goals, they ended up filming quite a few movies together during their early years, including playing extras in the Kevin Costner drama Field of Dreams, and Affleck also makes an appearance in School Ties as Chesty Smith.
The Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser-led film was penned by screenwriters Dick Wolf and Darryl Ponicsan and directed by Robert Mandel, who is most known for directing 1987’s Big Shots in addition to School Ties. The film was appreciated by critics at the time of its release, though they weren’t without their complaints. The general consensus was that Damon and Fraser were A+ cast members and the message of the film was honorable, but that the feature was a little clumsy in the delivery and that Fraser’s character was a little too perfect and without enough flaws to make him a relatable human.
Despite the general critical approval, School Ties was a box office flop. The feature cost Jaffe/Lansing Production $18 million to make and it only brought in $14.7 million at the box office. However, despite being a financial failure, the film has been remembered for decades by cinephiles as it acted as a launch pad for many now A-list actors, including Brendan Fraser, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Cole Hauser, and because of this, it gained enough popularity over the years to finally be released on BluRay for the first time in 2022.
School Ties takes place at a preparatory boarding school in New England, and the film showcases a fairly accurate example of what boarding school life in America is like as it was filmed at the historic Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, which has been in operation since 1901 and exists less than an hour drive from where Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
After wrapping up production on School Ties, Matt Damon filmed a number of movies, quickly adding more roles to his filmography before he finally hit his big break in 1997. His next part was in the historic Western drama Geronimo: An American Legend, directed by Walter Hill, where Damon played the supporting role of Lt. Britton Davis. After that, the actor picked up another supporting role in a made-for-TV movie called The Good Old Boys, where he played a man named Cotton Calloway.
Next, Matt Damon was featured in Glory Daze, Courage Under Fire, and Chasing Amy before he finally climbed his way up to leading roles in The Rainmaker and Good Will Hunting, the latter of which Damon and Affleck co-wrote together and starred in with Robin Williams. After that, it was smooth sailing for both actors as they quickly became A-list stars and have been at the top of the credits list in all of their projects for nearly 30 years.
