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Paper Clips provides a textbook example of how music can either save a film or ruin it. This soft-hearted, soft-headed documentary focuses on the story of how an eighth-grade class in tiny Whitwell, Tenn., tried to bring their study of the Holocaust home by collecting six million paper clips, one for each of the Jews murdered by the Third Reich. Unfortunately, directors Elliot Berlin and Joe Fab allow composer Charlie Barnett to ladle a goopy, saccharine string score over nearly every scene right from the jump, utterly undercutting the very modest amount of drama the story generates and totally overplaying the emotional nature of the situation until any genuine poignancy arrives swaddled in dulling cotton-candy sweetness. Might as well go out to the lobby concession stand and hook up a soda-syrup IV; the effect will be strikingly similar.

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