The Sapphires drizzles so much syrup over the story (of three aboriginal women who sang soul songs in Vietnam) that the audience is in danger of getting diabetes. I have no problem with true stories being edited or rewritten to better suit a feature film, but it does irk me when history is revised and artificially sweetened so much that it devolves into awful cliches and loses all believability. In the case of The Sapphires, this occurs in the love story between one of the aboriginal singers and the singer's Irish manager (Chris O'Dowd). Oh, isn't that nice, they're coming together, oh no he messed up, but wait he really loves her, oh no he's M.I.A. and has been probably killed by Charlie, oh she's so sad, oh so very sad, oh cry cry cry, but wait, he's actually been rescued and is recuperating in a hospital, oh yay they're back together and they return triumphantly to Australia, having overcome prejudice, the infamous Austro-Irish divide, and goddamn Charlie. It seems as though the filmmakers were emotionally greedy as they felt the need to triple-dip an interesting story in tearjerker/romantic comedy sauce. The performers make the most of the schmaltz, but by the end (to paraphrase Lisa Simpson), the audience has been pumped so full of sap that they're blowing their nose with a pancake.