I was watching the movie School Ties the other day. I figure it has been out long enough to not need spoiler boxes, but if anyone doesn’t want to know, please exit now.
Obviously the Jewish thing is the whole theme of the movie. When the guys figure out that he is Jewish, they are all bigots and hate him, and so forth.
But let’s ignore that, and pretend the religion angle didn’t exist, for a moment. Personally I think he deserved to be shunned by the group. He made a move on the girl a friend was seriously interested in, and had known much longer. That’s just crappy. In my circle, that is pretty much an unforgivable crime, and you would lose all friends in the circle.
I was curious how other people reacted to that part of the plot. It seemed that was the motivation for Dillon’s action, or at least the straw that broke the camel’s back. That the bigotry on his part was more of a tool, than a motivation. The bigotry is wrong, but so is the girl stealing, and it shouldn’t be morally whitewashed by the later bigotry. Green just didn’t seem as sympathetic to me as the movie seem to assume we would feel.