Cinema
Silent Fall
(`15', selected cinemas)
No wriggling this time
Mark Steyn
Autistics display the following charac- teristics: they do exactly what they want; although their behaviour seems irrational, they love pre-set patterns of words and numbers; in their sudden outbursts of anger, they're capable of displaying superhuman strength; they can mimic everything around them with uncanny accuracy — TV shows, piano sonatas, the guy next door — but they rarely speak in their own voice.
This surely is the condition of the average Hollywood movie: a gifted selfish formula-fol- lowing mimic which lavishes most of its ener- gy on explosions of violence yet rarely finds an individual voice. Films today mostly tap into our memories of images and situations and devices from other films, but at least Silent Fall acknowledges the debt openly.
When a nine-year old autistic boy is found with a bloody knife in his hand a few feet from the butchered bodies of his parents, the local sheriff turns to the town shrink for help: 'C'mon,' he says. 'I've seen Rain Man.' What follows is almost Brechtian in con- struction: a picture about autism that is itself autistic. It's written to a join-the-dots formu- la, it successfully passes off bits of other more original movies, and then, right at the end, just like the boy himself, it finds its own `Which film is nearest?' voice.
It's an Indian summer in Maryland, com- plete with a real Indian: 'My grandmother hated Indian summer,' he tells the doc. 'Her tribe used to believe a man's shadow would come alive and wrestle with his soul. No one would rest until the first snow.' Ah, right. There's the movie's long-range emotional weather outlook. The doc is one of those maverick types who gets up everyone's nose and, just to make sure, he's played by Richard Dreyfuss, who can usually be relied upon to be wriggling up the audience's col- lective nostril by the end of the opening titles. As a counterweight to the maverick in the sweatshirt, there's a straight in a jacket who wants to put the kid in a straitjacket. Dreyfuss is the only one who can get little Timmy (well played by Ben Faulkner) to tell what he saw that night, but he doesn't want the case. 'I'm retired,' he says. 'You mean you quit,' says the sheriff. 'I don't work with children anymore,' insists Dreyfuss. But his shadow is beginning to wrestle with his soul, or at least engage it in a vigorous lambada.
We know this because we've seen the same set-up in a gazillion other pictures, from its dramatic apotheosis in From Here to Eternity (the boxer who refuses to box again because of a dark shadow from his past) to its glorious send-up in Airplane (the pilot who refuses to fly again because of a dark shadow from his past). Hard to believe after Airplane that anyone could ever flog this hoary old device for real, but Dreyfuss gives it his best shot. He won't work with tiny Tim because of a case of his that went horribly wrong. We never do learn much about the case — possibly it was the Drey- fuss case lui-meme — but his wife correctly identifies the one who really needs the treat- ment. 'You're the one hiding from the world,' she tells Dreyfuss. 'Not Tim.'
Meanwhile, lurking in a closet at the mur- der scene is Tim's teenage sister. Sylvie is one of those characters you know is a deluxe weirdsmobile the moment you see her. She reminded me of Linda Hamilton in The Exorcist. And, blow me, here's Linda Hamil- ton 20 years on playing Dreyfuss'swife. She and Sylvie share a scene in the kitchen, where Hamilton, seething with silent anger, tears a chicken to pieces before our eyes. You wonder if this is going to be like one of those Agatha Christie whodunnits where everyone done it.
The physician-heal-thyself routine, the screwy teenager . . . When Tim starts cut- ting up playing card jacks and queens and moving them about, you'd be forgiven for thinking he's demonstrating how they wrote the script. In particular, Liv Tyler's perfor- mance as Sylvie seems to be all over the place. But there's a reason for this, and, as it becomes clear, the film finally takes on a life of its own, as Dreyfuss is forced to consider who else, aside from autistic Tim and his various voices, fmds it safer to play at being other people. Silent Fall is a formula picture, but finally it rings enough changes to keep the formula fresh.
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