Without any mawkishness, Mr Cameron noted that he had been the father of a severely disabled child, and had hoped he would live to adulthood, but his son had died aged six.
Then come religious maniacs of all descriptions, xenophobes and (a particular treat) the trend towards mawkishness that was exemplified in the reaction to Princess Diana's death in 1997.
The germs of mawkishness are clearly present in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760 67), though offset by a diluted Rabelaisianism and a certain cerebral quality.
In other hands, the portrayal of a motherless household would swing between wackiness and mawkishness, but Scott Hicks, the director, keeps the tone grounded and wry, and Alan Cubitt's screenplay imposes just enough of a structure on Carr's memoir while retaining its aching sense of loss, as well as its funniest punchlines.
If you need convincing, witness the combination of mawkishness and voyeuristic delight that greeted the death of Elliott Smith, the singer-songwriter whose lifelong fight with depression ended when he stabbed himself in the heart in 2003.
Still, if you compare the film with other such chick flicks, it's jauntily efficient, with enough waspish one-liners to offset the mawkishness.
There are some moments of mawkishness, especially at the finale.
Large dollops of mawkishness are also thrown in.
The mawkishness is toe-curling but Collette's performance is bold.
Seurat's optical theories may have given Divisionism its brushwork, but it is the realism of Courbet – badly distorted by the Macchiaioli painters of the 1850s – which leads to the mawkishness of Segantini's Spring in the Alps.
Braff is still a master at combining the hard facts of life with humour, but he moves into mawkishness in the last act, which will drive his critics to distraction.
