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 ? 
