Silent Fall (1994) * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
SILENT FALL has the shreds and shards of a far better movie lurking around inside it somewhere. It takes the form of a psychological thriller, where the detectives work hand-in-glove with psychiatrists to disentangle the mind of a witness to a murder. The witness is an autistic little boy, and there are strong hints that he is probably the killer as well -- after all, they found him swinging the knife while standing over his parent's corpses.
Richard Dreyfuss is the psychiatrist, and it is to his credit that he does the best job he can in a movie of such abysmal silliness. He has one very nice scene where he uses a deck of cards as a metaphor for how to jog the kid's memory. Unfortunately, like so many other ham-handed scripts, the metaphor is hammered on again and again until its initial charm collapses.
I had high hopes going into this movie. For the most part, psychiatrists get short shrift in films: they get portrayed as soulless technicians (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST), or fiendish maniacs (BAD DREAMS), or goofy and ineffectual softies (AMOS & ANDREW). Dreyfuss plays a fellow with smarts and presence, and he does a decent job of soldiering on while the film collapses around him. John Lithgow gets dragged in for a wasteful little cameo as a drug-dispensing doctor, which reminded me of what a good actor he is when he's not in junk like this.
The movie has so few real ideas about its alleged subjects that it's distressing. Take, for instance, the murder investigation. If you were a cop, would you let the children of the murder victims live in their house while it would still be a crime scene? The movie's insights into autism are also pretty much nonexistent. Autism, like the rest of the movie's conceits with psychology, are just cheap hooks onto which to hang the rest of the plot. And if there is another thriller out there with a more contrived mess of a plot than this one -- write me, I've got cigars.
The film's big climax has Dreyfuss getting the kid to re-enact almost on cue what he witnessed. Never mind if the people in the movie watching this thought it was believable: did anyone FILMING it think it was believable? Really?
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