Here on Earth | AccessAtlanta

Here on Earth

Grade: D

Verdict: A limp and clueless variation on Love Story.

Details: Starring Chris Klein, Leelee Sobieski and Josh Hartnett. Rated PG-13 for sensuality. 1 hour, 37 minutes

Review: The Earth of "Here on Earth" is stuck in a 45-year time warp. The movie's small Massachusetts town seems to have no fast-food chains, no cell phones, no computers. The townsfolk drink vanilla shakes (instead of smoothies) at the local family-owned diner. The young people fall in love over Robert Frost's poetry (instead of, say, the lyrics of some alt-rock band).

Trapped in this hermetically sealed setting, with a script that would run 10 minutes if the clichés were yanked out of it, the movie's young stars can't win. Chris Klein ("American Pie") plays arrogant prep-school senior Kelley, whose clash one evening with blue-collar local Jasper (Josh Hartnett) results in an accident that burns down Mable's Table. That's the restaurant owned by the mom of Samantha (Leelee Sobieski), whose role as Jasper's kinda/sorta girlfriend becomes even shakier when she starts swapping moony glances with Kelley.

Kelley and Jasper are ordered by the town's judge (a sardonic black woman who seems to have been flown in from syndicated daytime TV) to spend the summer rebuilding the restaurant. Kelley even has to rent a room from Jasper's family, though he refuses to be civil to them.

So it's trouble when Kelley and Samantha bond over Frost's poem about birch trees. Once burnt by a prep-school boy, Sam's sister (Elaine Hendrix) warns, "They are all the same." The movie plays like a woodsy, non-musical version of West Side Story, until it tries to be "Love Story."

Sobieski, whose self-amused level-headedness is appealing, has to tackle the movie's worst moments. Seeing shirtless, sweaty Kelley at the construction site, she murmurs, "I'm hot." Then there's the mimed baseball game she plays with Klein on their first date. Twice, she shares this exchange with her screen dad:

"It's good to be your father."

"It's good to be your daughter."

Everybody in "Here on Earth" is very, very nice. That's a big problem. Drama is based on conflict, on people fighting to get what they want. Here, the characters try to outdo one another being sweet and dispensing homey wisdom. Meanwhile, the score by Andrea Morricone (yes, Ennio's son) drowns us in molasses.

"Here on Earth" is a missed opportunity. Sure, it's not the brainless teen comedies now monopolizing the multiplex. But it could have been so much more, a drama that showed teens in a true light: as complex individuals trying to cope with their first-time feelings of true love and bitter grief. Unfortunately, the makers of "Earth" (screenwriter Michael Sitzman and first-time feature director Mark Piznarski) never manage to spark a single real emotion.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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