Carrabba can mold any sentiment into totalizing torment without surrendering its sweetness.
Like the best folk-song interpreters, he is capable of singing of incredible violence without betraying any weak sentiment: "With his sword he cut off her head and kicked it against the wall," he relates in Little Mathie Grove, as coolly as though the murderer had just peeled a banana.
Reviewing this drama from Robert Siegel (who wrote the screenplay for "The Wrestler") in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the screenplay "avoids sentimentality without abandoning sentiment".
Unlike his script for "The Wrestler," with its embarrassment of clichés and bucket of tears, the screenplay for "Big Fan" avoids sentimentality without abandoning sentiment.
CITIZEN RUTH Alexander Payne's 1996 satire, about a pregnant derelict caught between factions in the abortion wars, is anything but jaundiced: poking both where it tickles and where it hurts, Payne evokes empathy without pity and tenderness without sentiment.
When it's well written, well acted and portrays its characters without sentiment and without moralising, TV drama can still be a powerful artistic force.
The lucidity Howard then brought to 55 Days (2012) at Hampstead theatre, with Douglas Henshall's Cromwell in fictional encounter with Mark Gatiss's King Charles I, represented the art of stage direction at its most refined: complex information conveyed without effort, profound emotion conveyed without sentiment.
But what family story isn't without its sentiment?
It is a celebratory, emotional film without cloying sentiment, which is no small achievement.
Their decision made sense even without added sentiment: about 11 years ago they became engaged here.
