Catch Me If You Can (2003, DVD)

Steven Spielberg's latest film, Catch Me If You Can begins at a Rotary Club awards banquet in New Rochelle, NY. The smarmy Rotary President is giving an award to Frank Abagnale Sr. (Christopher Walken). In the front row, Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) is beaming with pride and he's also slowly peeling the label off a bottle of wine. Like so many of the great directors, Steven Spielberg is a gifted craftsman, but subtlety is not one of those gifts. The image of the peeled label will return several more times in Catch Me If You Can and serves as an important and appropriate symbol for a film about a young man with the amazing ability to shed his identity at a moment's notice. Frank Abagnale Jr. may not have been old enough to drink, vote, or be drafted, but he was on his way to becoming one of the most wanted con men in American history.

The notion of shedding labels goes beyond its textual meaning to apply to the major talent involved with Catch Me If You Can, all of whom clearly viewed the film as a much-needed lark. After the long and problematic shoot for Gangs of New York, you can't blame DiCaprio for wanting to try something lighter and more contemporary. After going dark and violent for Road To Perdition, Tom Hanks must have appreciated lighter duty. And in the middle of a lengthy stretch of weighty and portentous dramas (including A.I. and this summer's Minority Report), Spielberg must have been in the mood for a quick fun shoot.

The result is Catch Me If You Can, a film that announces its whimsical nature almost instantly, with a cute animated title sequence set to John Williams's Mancini-inflected score. Catch Me If You Can rarely feels substantial, but its sense of fun is impeccable. This is the kind of lark that only very talented people could take. Only Spielberg could not justify a 140 minute game of cat-and-mouse, but also make it this purely enjoyable. Spielberg gets a kick out of the 1960s style, but what's more interesting is how Spielberg takes control of the largely true story of Frank Abagnale Jr. (the film is "inspired by" his life) and makes it into a quintessentially Spielberg-themed film. Fortunately, Spielberg's reshaping of Abagnale's story into a Spielberg allegory isn't as egregious as his shifting Alice Walker's The Color Purple into his own story. Here, the pieces fit well, even if there's a sense that you've gotta read Abagnale's autobiography of the same name to find out a truer version of his life.

Frank gets caught. We know this because the *real* first scene of the movie involves Frank being extradited from a maximum security French prison. That's not the end of the story, but it's a good stepping point for a flashback to how things went so far.

So Frank Jr. sits at the banquet table peeling the label from the wine bottle and grinning with pride. He's got a pretty good life. His parents (mom is played by French actress Nathalie Baye) dance together and appear very much in love, his father owns a stationary store that seems to be doing well, and they have a nice suburban house. But there's a dark cloud, as the morning after the banquet, dad wakes up Frank Jr. and leads him in a small con to try to get a loan from the bank. The Yankees win, pop explains to his son, not because they have Mickey Mantle, but because the opponents are intimidated by the pinstripes. The clothes make the man. The aura makes the man. The confidence makes the man.

But Frank Senior's got problems with the IRS. Serious problems. And soon everything begins to fall apart. The family has to leave the house. Frank Jr. has to change schools. And Mom and Dad are getting a divorce and when Frank's asked to choose, he bolts.

A scared seventeen year old alone in the big city and what's Frank to do? Well, he remembers the story his father told him about two mice in a pail of buttermilk. One mouse just gave up and died. The other mouse scurried and struggled until he churned the milk into butter and crawled to safety. So Frank, determined to be that second mouse, scurries his way into small cons himself, forging checks and using his charm to get small sums of money. But that's not enough and soon Frank is posing as a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. And he's getting rich off of it. Explaining how he manages would spoil too much of the movie, though. Let's just say that the film is detailed and smart about how Frank gets through life, but it still leaves enough gaping holes to leave you scratching your head.

Frank's adversary, as such, is Carl Hanratty (puffy Tom Hanks) of the FBI. Hanratty is in charge of the bank fraud division, a job that nobody else wants a part of. He's an egghead posing as a secret agent. He's living the lie just as much as Frank is and the two men develop a relationship that's as paternal, finally, as it is confrontational.

Catch Me If You Can is a smart comedy with a core of disappointment and genuine sadness. That's how Spielberg is able to get away with it. The director's only other real effort at comedy was the disaster 1941. Now 1941 gets a bit of a bad rap and it contains several madcap set pieces as good as anything the director has ever done. However, the film doesn't have a core. It doesn't have any emotional resonance. So once the screws come loose, the film just goes out of control. Catch Me If You Can becomes, like so many Spielberg films before it, about the disintegration of the family and about boys searching for father figures.

As a result, DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale Jr. becomes a logical extension of Henry Thomas's Elliot, of Christian Bale's Jim, of the displaced children of Hook and Jurassic Park, of Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones (in the third movie at least) of Haley Joel Osment's David. Hanks's Hanratty becomes another version of Jude Law's Gigolo Joe, of E.T., of John Malkovich's Basie, of Sean Connery's Henry Jones, of Robin Williams's Peter, of Sam Neill's Alan Grant. The list goes on and on. Spielberg's collected works are chock full of lost boys and failed father figures.

Again, I haven't read Abagnale's book, but there are dozens of possible motives for Frank's cons. Another director would have made Frank do it for the money. Another for the chance to do it with beautiful women. Another would have made him an off-shoot of the rebellious 1960s doing whatever he could to screw the government. Not Spielberg. As Jeff Nathanson's script plays it, Frank Abagnale's sole goal in stealing millions of dollars is to restore his family and return things to the way they were before. And even when that seems unlikely, he uses his faked life to attempt to start a new life with cute nurse Brenda (Amy Adams) and her upstanding Louisianna Lutheran family (with father Martin Sheen). He attempts to create a surrogate family. And then even though Hanratty wants to put him away, Frank reaches out to him as well.

This is one of the minor flaws of the film. Frank is a complicated character, but he's complicated in such a warm and fuzzy and sappy way that we couldn't dislike him even if we were inclined to. That doesn't change the fact that he was a crook. But you'd never know that from the story Spielberg's telling. He's just another Spielberg Pinocchio figure, a boy whose life is built on fragmentations and lies and must seek truth to become real.

Surrounded by much of his regular production team, Spielberg is in stylistically fine form. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and composer John Williams have been with him for a long time and know how to give him what he wants. And production designer Jeannine Claudia Oppewall fills in well for Rick Carter.

Spielberg has, let's just say a rosy picture of the 1960s that he would like to paint here. If your vision of the 1960s involves rock-n-roll, political unrest, or minorities of any shape, size or shade, this isn't that kinda movie. In fact, if I didn't know that we were dealing with the 1960s here, I might have guessed Spielberg was doing his impression of the halcyon 1950s. He creates a world of gauzy lighting, wonderful art-deco design, and television. This is a time where all the kids idolized pilots and where pretty girls wanted nothing more than to become stewardesses. This is a world where Frank can learn to be a doctor or lawyer from watching classic television like Dr. Kildaire and Perry Mason. Since Spielberg cut his teeth directing shows like that, I guess he can be forgiven the nostalgia.

[And did I mention the complete and total absence of minorities even in the backgrounds? This is something that Spielberg needs to be more aware of. It's one thing to just not make movies about African-American characters (with the exception of The Color Purple), but after white-washing the future in both A.I. and Minority Report, Spielberg whitewashes the past here. Frank hangs out in a New York City devoid of blacks and a Miami that's Hispanic-free. Again, I don't need lead characters, but could you have walked through Miami International Airport in 1966 without seeing a single person of color? Just curious. For a smart filmmaker and a good old fashioned bleeding heart liberal, this is a mistake Stevie just keeps on making.]

The film just looks spiffy, with nicely established contrasts between Frank's party fantasy life and Hanratty's dismally anonymous office life that involves working on Christmas. Hanratty follows Frank because of envy as well as respect.

Spielberg also makes the most of his star-studded cast, getting appealing work out of even the smallest parts. Sheen and Baye both have nice parenting moments and the lovely Jennifer Garner has a brief, but steamy appearance as a former model who wants to use Frank for his money. I also really enjoyed Amy Adams as the brace-faced nurse who falls for Dr. Frank. She was awful in Cruel Intentions 2 (sometimes known as the pilot for Manchester Prep), but she's got a sweet comic touch here and it's a pity when she vanishes.

Christopher Walker is likely to get his first Oscar nomination since Deer Hunter here. Or at least it seems possible. Remember episode of The Simpsons where he's at a Book Fair scaring small children with a rendition of "Good Night Moon"? That's how he is in the early scenes here... He's scary because he's nice. And gentle. And totally sympathetic. You can see his bitterness at having his life taken from him, but you've gotta love the demonic glint in his eyes when he tacitly encourages Frank to keep messing with the government that has rendered him impotent. Plus he gets to dance. And any time you get to watch Christopher Walken dance, it's a plus.

Tom Hanks has problems with his New England accent, but I'm not convinced that it's a *bad* accent per se. It just sounds odd. It's certainly better than, say, Rob Morrow's Quiz Show debacle. But Hanks works because we like him. We like him in horned rim glasses. We like him fat. And darnit we like him with a weird Bah-ston accent. The performance grew on me as he went along and finally become sympathetic.

Now people may mock Leonardo DiCaprio, because that's become the popular thing to do. And his work in The Beach and The Man In The Iron Mask invites such mockery. But I think he's wonderful here and the film couldn't work without him. He does naive well and he shows fine comic chops in other scenes. And as Frank becomes increasingly desperate, DiCaprio becomes even better. He also has an odd accent going, but I guess that's pretty much become a way of life for him this holiday season.

So is Catch Me If You Can going to help any of the talent shed any of their labels? Will it make Spielberg, Hanks, and DiCaprio light comedy legends? And will Catch Me If You Can join the ranks of Spielberg's most respected and honored films? Probably not and probably not. But the movie is a swift two hours and twenty minutes of relatively smart fun. And guess what? This isn't a 3.5 star review. And it isn't a 4.5 star review. I'm totally comfortable with 4.