Here on Earth

YEAR 2000 TRADEMARKS:

• Bleach blonde hair
• Alt-rock soundtrack
• Annoying “Are you ready for Fox DVD?” ad on disc (the one that starts with Tyler Durden saying, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” and features 90% X-Men clips)

THE MOVIE:

Weeks before his graduation, private school snob Kelley (Chris Klein) drives his cherry-red sports car to the wrong side of the tracks, where he flirts with All-American waitress Samantha (Leelee Sobieski). Witnessing this snob exchange pleasantries with his signifigant other from a distant diner booth, Samantha’s townie sort-of-boyfriend, Jasper (Josh Hartnett) slides over and confronts Kelley with a scathing, brutally honest assessment of the wealthy young man worthy of Hannibal Lecter (or Vin Diesel in Fast and the Furious):

HARTNETT (leaning against milkshake counter): You tryin’ to get at me, Richie?
KLEIN (fixing J. Crew collar): Excuse me?
HARTNETT (adjusting John Deer baseball cap): Yeah, Richie Rich. That’s your name isn’t it?

Richie Rich is not, in fact, Klein’s name. (Though he is wealthy!) He replies with equal ruthlessness, seething, “I would say that you’re poor.” And soon, the two young men are in a drag race (set, like much of the film, to a post-grunge single―in this case the Foo Fighter’s “Breakout”) that ends with both drivers crashing  into a local greasy spoon and engulfing it in a 50-foot wall of flames that is insanely disproportionate in its violence to anything else in Here on Earth. (For comparison: The film’s second most violent moment is brief shoving match.)

The town’s folk-wise judge, in the tradition of great cinematic unorthodox rulings, sentences the two boys to rebuild the restaurant, which means Klein must leave his ivory private school dorm and stay in the care of Hartnett’s parents until the restaurant is repaired or they learn something about each other (legally speaking, of course). Not consulted in this scene are the owners of the restaurant, who presumably would rather hire professionals than remain out of business 5 times longer so two high-schoolers can improve their people skills.

At first, Klein puts up a cold front, making all sorts of snide comments to his lowbrow coworkers. But Samantha, who sees something in him, breaks through Richie Rich’s  front to the tender, poetry-reciting soul beneath. The pair embark behind Hartnett’s back in small-town love — which according to Here on Earth consists of exactly two things: (1) walking through the woods and (2) sitting in open fields, picking at long strands of grass, tearing them into little pieces, and tossing those pieces stoically:

LEGACY:

At a glance, there isn’t much memorable or culturally significant about Here on Earth. In fact, nobody I spoke to about the movie could really remember the film during the 1.5 weeks in which I was (for some reason) telling virtually everyone I knew that I had re-watched a decade-old teen melodrama. (Somewhat oddly though, everybody I talked to about the movie’s cast commented, without fail, that co-star Leelee Sobieski looks like Helen Hunt). The two most blatantly dated aspects of the film are (a) a soundtrack containing multiple Goo Goo Dolls and Sixpence None the Richer songs and (b) this dude:

Bleach-blond hair. Thin goatee. Black tank-top. In the film he is Josh Hartnett’s townie best friend and has only a few brief scenes, yet every timed he swooped into any conversation set in a local convenience store or bar, I paused the film to ponder with awe the almost mathematical logic of his douchebaggery: Did he bleach his hair first, then, having decided he needed to look more like a meth-head, grow the wispy goatee? Or did he already have the facial pubes when the inspiration struck to Guy Fieri his hair? Or did he, like, time them to happen concurrently? (I suppose both at once would techincally be impossible, right?)

There is, however, one overarching 2000 quality to Here on Earth that deserves consideration: it was reveling in the drama of WASP-y, pastel-clad American teenagers in New England back when The Notebook was still a tacky paperback sitting on suburban coffe tables nationwide, and half a decade before Nicholas Sparks even started penning Dear John and The Last Song. Perhaps Here on Earth was ahead of its time. It was, after all, embracing teenage melodrama 4 or 5 years before audiences were ready to do so again, the way they would with not only the Nicholas Sparks adaptations, but with the moody vampires of Twilight and the Machiavellian teens of Gossip Girl.

However, it’s also possible that Here on Earth, which was a substantial flop, failed to catch on the way The Notebook (with it’s $80-million gross) did because it was simply a worse example of the genre than the later, more successful incarnations. It’s tough to say. By it’s nature, it’s separate good melodrama from bad. It’s like trying to say why, on Lost, Jack’s magical tattoos are silly, but Desmond’s time-traveling abilities are brilliant.

Yet there are clues one can gather in Here on Earth that clarify how bad it is. For example, take Klein’s private valedictorian’s speech (below) which he deliveres alone, expelled, watching his clsasmates from a distance and citing a Robert Frost poem like one of those cringe-inducing highschool yearbook quotes: