A John Williams composition that sounds more like Henry Mancini and a cartoonish title animation that’s heavily reminiscent of the Pink Panther’s set a breezy tone for Steven Spielberg’s Christmas Candy confection, Catch Me if You Can. They’ve even recreated the old game show What’s My Line? with our boy as the mystery guest. But unlike the candy, this film is not just sweet empty calories but a terrific entertainment; quite a surprise since most recent movies based on true stories, as this one is, are terrible.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr., an extremely smart 16 year old from the New York City suburbs who freaks out when his parents (Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye) split up. Instead of choosing a parent to live with, Frank runs away. He begins to impersonate almost anyone, starting with airline pilots, and to forge checks and other useful documentation. Smart or not, one bit that shouldn’t have been left out is how someone his age learned how to do this.
After awhile–long enough for the boy to scam enough to buy his bankrupt dad a new Cadillac–he attracts the attention of Carl Hanratty of the FBI’s Bank Fraud squad. This is a very interesting role for Tom Hanks, quite opposite the killer of Road to Pertition. Hanratty is the quintessential workaholic, he’s left his (since remarried) wife and young daughter behind, and is even in the office when Abagnale calls him on Christmas. 15 years ago Hanks made a Dragnet movie and he, without going over the top, almost takes Dan Ackroyd’s Joe Friday as his model for this role.
The con, and the pursuit, go on, with the capture almost made time after time. What drives Hanratty the most seems to be his inability to outwit a teenager. Spielberg emphasizes this by coming back, again and again, as Hanratty asks Abagnale how he cheated to pass the bar exam in Louisiana; this just doesn’t seem to be something that the boy could talk his way through. After his stint as a co-pilot who never actually takes the controls, our hero decides to settle down for awhile as a doctor in Georgia–he talks his way into a supervisory position that doesn’t require him to put hands on a patient.
While there he meets and falls for a lovely blonde (Brenda, played by Amy Adams) and, although the audience never sees this, presumably senses that his time is running short. He asks Brenda to marry him, she is all over the idea, and they’re off to visit her parents. Daddy’s (Martin Sheen) a district attorney in New Orleans, so Abagnale mentions he has a law degree in addition to his M.D. and sure enough the next month he’s working as an assistant DA.
But all good things, the vision of familial love he so desires and sees in the Strongs, are illusory to an 18 year old. Hanratty has tracked him down to the huge engagement party the Strongs put on and he has to run. He wants to take the girl with him but she’s too weak and he flees to Europe in the company of eight comely young wanna-be stewardesses. The chase needs to conclude and so we aren’t shown the escapades on the Continent, just told that there is more than enough to get Hanratty on a plane to France for a final confrontation.
Interspersed through the film have been short scenes of Abagnale’s French prison and flight back to America courtesy of Uncle Sam. Arriving at LaGuardia Airport, he makes one more escape only to find that the reason for all of his efforts the past three years have been for nothing, and just like with Humpty Dumpty, the pieces couldn’t be put back together again. To be honest, I would have ended the movie right there, with DiCaprio running on the tarmac, but the story continues as we see imprisonment and eventual redemption by using his understanding of bank fraud as an employee of the FBI.
Another change I would have made, to cut Catch Me from 140 minutes to 100: The movie opens with over 30 minutes of buildup to his departure, which does give us a very solid grounding in our protagonist and his motivation, but one thinks a director as skilled as Spielberg could have cut this act in half without sacrificing any clarity. Certainly, one can’t hold the screenwriter, Jeff Nathanson too accountable–this is his first serious production, since I would barely count Rush Hour 2 and Speed 2 not at all.
One observation: DiCaprio is great as Abagnale but I wonder just how long he’ll be able to get away with playing teenage roles. His next part, not yet in production is the title character in Baz Luhrman’s Alexander the Great. Much of the meat of the story takes place before the Macedonian king’s 21 birthday.
Definitely recommended
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