There’s No Joy Like Tears for the Holiday

What hath “It’s a Wonderful Life” wrought?

That all-time holiday favorite has inspired dozens of seasonal weepies, some of which lay on sentiment so thick that it would make Frank Capra blush. Take this season’s offerings:

* In “Patch Adams,” Robin Williams plays a first-year medical student who breeches hospital protocol by slipping into a ward of cancer-stricken children and bringing smiles to their little faces by clowning about in a rubber nose with bedpans on his feet.

* In “Jack Frost,” Michael Keaton plays a workaholic dad who, reincarnated as a snowman, risks melting away in the midday sun as he races to the local ice rink to watch his boy play a big hockey game.

* And, in “Stepmom,” Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon play motherly rivals who learn to bond after Sarandon’s character develops cancer--with Christmas just around the corner.

Critics may cry manipulation, but this is the time of year when Hollywood likes to serve up films coated with enough goo to rival candied yams.

“It seems like they set out to hit your buttons from the first scene onward,” said USC film professor Rick Jewell.

But history shows that moviegoers love it when Shirley Temple inspires a disabled girl to walk in “Heidi” or Wallace Beery bids a tearful farewell to his adoring son in “The Champ.” From “It’s a Wonderful Life”--still considered by many to be the apogee of sentimental filmmaking--to Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,” films that tug at the heartstrings remain enormously popular year after year.

The current King of Schmaltz is Williams, whether he’s playing the saintly Patch Adams or the husband whose love is so powerful that it defies the bounds of heaven and Earth in “What Dreams May Come.”

Sprinkled with Rod McKeun-like dialogue, “What Dreams May Come” takes Williams into hell, where he pleads with his wife (Annabell Sciorra) not to give up and to go with him--or else he’s willing to stay with her while their children remain in a heavenly existence. In “Patch Adams,” a clowning Williams can even bring a smile to a man dying of pancreatic cancer by donning angel’s wings as a preview of coming attractions.

“Every shot in a film is put into a film to provoke something,” said Tom Shadyac, the film’s director. “You may call it manipulation, but we call it storytelling.”

The film is based on a true story about a man who was inspired to become a doctor while institutionalized for depression and who forms an institute dedicated to a more connected, personalized approach to medicine. Some early reviews slammed “Patch Adams” for being “oppressively sweet” and “shamelessly sappy.” But Shadyac believes critics often fail to connect with the emotions felt by the public at large.

In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Shadyac said, “George Bailey sitting with his head bowed on a bar saying he’s not much of a praying man but he’s at the end of his rope are emotions that connect with huge audiences that critics almost always miss.

“Every genre of film is about manipulation,” the director added. “If you don’t think some highly effective intellectual filmmaker is trying to manipulate an audience, think again. Their job is to try and move that audience.”

In director Troy Miller’s “Jack Frost,” Keaton’s character feels so guilty about being away from his son Charlie that he gives him a harmonica and says that if he ever needs him, he should just play a little tune. Then the father dies unexpectedly in a traffic accident, and Charlie pulls out the harmonica a year later at Christmas; Dad returns inside six feet of snow with branches for arms.

Film critic Roger Ebert wondered: “At the end, the human Jack Frost materializes again, inside swirling fake snow, and tells his wife and son, ‘If you ever need me, I’m right here.’ And Charlie doesn’t even ask, ‘What about on a hot day?’ ”

“I don’t have a defense for it,” co-producer Mark Canton said of the film’s gushy story line. “It’s a piece of entertainment. I’m satisfied. I think it’s actually good sentiment, as opposed to overly done.”

Canton, the former head of Columbia/TriStar studios, said that when he went to the Warner Bros. project as a producer, the script was more effects-oriented.

“We made the movie more emotional,” Canton explained. “I felt I wanted a movie that would be more of a completion movie, a story that was about having the opportunity to come back and say, ‘Goodbye.’ ”

Why are filmmakers so enamored with pumping emotion into their films?

“I think filmmakers have an awful problem now,” said Eric Weissmann, an entertainment attorney and veteran observer of the Hollywood scene. “It’s so hard to figure out what direction to go in. With special effects, there’s only so much you can do. We’ve already had floods and earthquakes and hurricanes, so that avenue is sort of mined out. Another avenue is the action film, but how many more car chases and stunts can you have?

“Then you have the interpersonal relationship avenue,” Weissmann added. “You can go one of two ways--sad, which people don’t necessarily want to go to because their lives are perhaps sad enough, or you have honey.”

Director Chris Columbus said he knew there would be pitfalls to avoid when he made the film “Stepmom.” The story, after all, is about a woman with cancer. But Columbus said he deliberately avoided making the film overly sentimental and noted that Sarandon’s character is never shown near death.

“I didn’t feel that was appropriate in this movie,” Columbus said. “That is where it could have gone over the edge. As it is, you don’t know if Susan will live another six months or a year.”

Columbus said he decided to make “Stepmom” because his own mother died about two months before he received the original script.

“In subsequent months, I read 75 to 100 other pieces of material, but nothing felt right or appropriate,” he recalled. “Then they sent me this script and I felt at the time there was enough emotional distance to at least read it. I realized I had to do this picture.”

One of the film’s most emotional scenes is when Roberts and Sarandon meet and Sarandon reaches across the table and takes Roberts’ hand.

“If your emotion is real and you feel it comes from a certain place, then it’s real and isn’t manipulation,” the director said. “I think audiences are becoming more sophisticated,” he added. “There is a chance if this picture was made at a different studio with a different set of rules, the doctor would have descended from heaven and declared Susan cancer-free, then the entire family would have lived happily ever after.”

Filmmakers get in trouble when they don’t trust their audiences, said Karen Croner, who wrote the screenplay adaptation of “One True Thing,” in which Meryl Streep plays a mother dying of cancer.

“I think there are movies where the music tells you what to feel at every moment,” Croner said. “But in ‘One True Thing,’ it was important for the director to pull back on that and allow room for the audience not to be told what to feel.”

Canton said “Jack Frost” also earned excellent scores with preview audiences. “It tested over 90% with kids,” Canton said, “and it was particularly good with moms.”

But the film debuted at No. 3, grossing a lackluster $7.1 million on its first weekend in release.