Photo By Joe Lederer

Dakota Fanning gets some tips from writer/director John Gatins on the set of Dreamer.

This is no time for sentiment. The failed emergency rescues in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina remain in front of our eyes as the recovered bodies of poor elderly blacks keep adding up. Accounts of government corruption, whether money laundering or leaking secrets, headline the daily news. People are worried about rising heating bills.

How can someone not be cynical today, not be critical of the world around them?

Hollywood's message to America this fall: Cynics be damned. Movie sentimentality is the leading genre, with various filmmakers working out new ways to keep heartache true.

Outside movie theaters, sentimentality is considered a box of Whitman's Chocolates. It's something passed from grandmother to grandmother but has little value to the leading judges of culture and entertainment. The hip want something different from film sentiment, or at least disguise it in social justice themes, young love or sibling rivalry.

Blue-collar sentiment, at least when it comes to battles for workers' rights, requires layers of grit and dust over everything and everybody. Arguably it also calls for the help of tough-as-nails women.

In Niki Caro's North Country, classic beauty Charlize Theron sports a weathered face and a jumpsuit-clad body as Josey, a single mom who works in a northern Minnesota mine. The drama raises a notch when Josey files a class-action lawsuit against the mine and leads a fight against workplace sexual harassment.

The heartache belongs to Josey's friend, Glory (Frances McDormand), a mineworker battling illness, but it's up to Theron to make North Country's sentiment feel true. To do so, she covers herself in grit and dust. There is no place for a conventional Hollywood beauty in a tale of blue-collar heroism.

Bad behavior from a beautiful woman wearing beautiful clothes qualifies filmmaker Curtis Hanson's adaptation of the Jennifer Weiner sister novel In Her Shoes as chick-lit melodrama. Cameron Diaz is Maggie, the younger, pretty and wayward sister who suffers from dyslexia. She supplies the film's style and sex appeal. Toni Collette is older sib Rose, a Princeton grad and lawyer at a top Philadelphia law firm. She provides the emotional connection for working women desperate to make time for a personal life. Shirley MacLaine is Ella, their long-absent grandmother who helps bring the sisters together. MacLaine inspires mothers to accompany their grown daughters to the movie.

Bad movie sentiment still generates tears if the music swells at just the right moment. The syrup of In Her Shoes is contained within teary reconciliations between competitive siblings, romances and family arguments -- all popular diversions for women.

The hit of the summer, the documentary March of the Penguins, is Animal Planet melodrama -- birth, work, love and death all rolled into a journey adventure set in Antarctica. Cute creatures grab the heartstrings every time.

Closer to home are the sticky sentimental tales Elizabethtown and Dreamer, both set in Kentucky, arguably ground zero for movie sentiment.

In writer/director Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) heads to rural Kentucky to make funeral arrangements in his father's hometown. Children jump on front-yard trampolines and wave to the Bloom's outsider hero. It's a small-town America fantasy that's equal parts Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life and TV's The Andy Griffith Show. A romance between Drew and a flirty flight attendant (Kirsten Dunst) is a welcome diversion, but the film's focus remains on small-town life. Americana is seldom this sweet.

In Dreamer, Ben Crane (Kurt Russell) is a longtime racehorse breeder and owner of a small Lexington horse farm who nurses a heroic horse named Soñador back to racing form after a crippling injury. Dakota Fanning is Cale, the film's girl hero and constant horse companion, and her wide-open face and toothy grin is perfect for teary outbreaks.

Dreamer director John Gatins is on his way to Lexington for a mid-October premiere of his film but stops at a Cincinnati hotel before his afternoon drive. Gatins (writer of Coach Carter, Summer Catch and Varsity Blues) sticks to his belief that thick sentimentality is better than the pratfalls and double entendres often found in kid-aimed movies.

He's experienced kids' positive reactions firsthand at advance screenings around the country. If kids are willing to take a chance, to watch a story that unfolds at a slower pace than their favorite Saturday morning cartoons, then Gatins predicts a good time for adults, too.

As far as the film's timing, he says it's dead-on.

"Innocence crashed after 9/11," he says, sitting in a Hilton Netherland Hotel room that's bare except for a chair, sofa and telephone. "I remember a friend calling me on the morning of September 11 to wake me up and warn me because who knew if planes were heading for California? I didn't believe it at first. Sure, I wasn't in New York that day but it did affect me. It makes you think about your family. I had just written another sports drama, Hard Ball, and it made me consider what types of movies I wanted to make next."

Asked if making a sentimental movie like Dreamer hurts his career opportunities, Gatins sums things up like this: "Martin Scorsese may claim to be a practitioner of movie melodrama, but his reputation allows him to get away with a statement like that. I'm no Martin Scorsese."

If feelings about sentimentality are as ageist as it seems, then Gatins has targeted his audience well -- children and the parents who bring them to movies. ©