Directed by Steven Spielberg. 145 minutes.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye. Released by Dreamworks Pictures.
With Catch Me If You Can Steven Spielberg has crafted a Grade A, old-fashioned caper drama that focuses more on the depth of two men’s personalities, intelligence, and will to succeed than on details of stealing or crime. The two men are Lt. Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), an obsessed check fraud FBI agent whose dedication to his job is so fierce that former agents question his ability to tell a joke, and Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), the object of Hanraddy’s obsession, fraud mastermind, and, oddly enough, high schooler.
The film is obviously a personal one for Spielberg, a child
of divorce, whose parents split up when he was young, which has been apparent
in some of his other films, namely E.T.
As Catch Me If You Can opens, Abagnale is living with his father, Frank Sr. (a wonderfully sad and scene-stealing Christopher Walken), somewhat of a minor con-man himself, and his former French beauty of a mother. One day, Frank’s parents are called into a parent-teacher conference only to find that their son has been holding parent-teacher conferences of his own. In his new school, in order to get back at a bully, Frank fooled his classmates into believing he was a substitute teacher. Realizing that he is able to get back what the government took away from his family when they closed his father’s business, Abagnale begins taking part in small cons and eventually, after finding out his that his parents are divorcing because of his mother’s infidelity, steals on a grand scale, which includes him cashing four million dollars in checks and posing as a lawyer, doctor, and airplane pilot over a course of four years.
Spielberg’s film has the look and feel of an old-fashioned 1960s caper film, capturing the era in which its story takes place (the script is based on a true story), much in part due to the typically excellent camera work, use of lighting, and unique filters used by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a Spielberg favorite. The script, penned by Jeff Nathanson from Abagnale’s biography, is great writing, focusing more on what makes Frank and Lt. Hanratty tick and how their minds work, rather than focus on exact details of Abagnale’s crimes. The combined work of Spielberg, his actors, his crew, and Nathanson equal a vastly entertaining and easily likeable high prestige heist film, much like last year’s Ocean’s Eleven, only better.
Hanks and DiCaprio, who certainly gives his best performance in some time though I have yet to see Gangs of New York, play well off one another as the respective cat and mouse in Catch Me If You Can, though it is Christopher Walken, that wonderful actor, who steals nearly every scene he is in. Though the trademark charm and quirks are present in the film as in most of Walken’s work, there is a touching sadness to his character- a man unable to live out his own dreams of winning back all he has lost, failing to discourage his own son to stop outrunning and swindling the federal government and living vicariously through him. A wonderful monologue which is repeated during the film a few times in which Walken tells a story about two mice in a bowl of butter sums up his character and the movie itself entirely. There may possibly be no other actor who could pull such a monologue off as beautifully or gracefully as Walken.
Artistically, this has been a pinnacle year in Steven Spielberg’s career, which started out back in June with his brilliant sci-fi thriller, Minority Report, and ended with this film, one which seems to be a personal one for him. It is refreshing to see that a director, not only one who can have his choice of any film he wants to make, but also a prominent producer, and studio head, working at the top of his form and striving to make personal films that take commercial risks and make artistic statements. Though Minority Report is a better film and is more about something than his latest film, Catch Me If You Can is a strong piece of American pulp, playing off the nation’s obsession with real-life crime stories and larger than life characters.
The film works where many similarly-structured and themed films went wrong. Many other recent era-spanning films or stories dealing with actual, often incredible incidents make the mistake of thinking that the audience is primarily interested in seeing a replication of how the era looked and observing techniques in a film that replicate that era’s filmic techniques or knowing detail by detail what happened in the true incident, but neglecting the most important aspect of such stories- interesting and fully developed characters. Catch Me If You Can makes no such mistake. It is an exciting film, yes. It uses techniques to make it appear like a film from the era in which it takes place as well. It is also very likely representative of the real case of Frank Abagnale, Jr. But its most important attribute is that we care for its characters. They are interesting. We want to know their motivations. They want to know each other’s motivations. “How did you pass the bar exam,” Hanratty continues to ask Abagnale throughout the course of the film, which Frank continues to avoid answering, causing it to become a running joke. Though Frank finally does provide the answer, his reasons could most likely be summed up better in a story about two mice in a bowl of butter.