Catch Me If You Can Review
by Laura Clifford (laura AT reelingreviews DOT com)December 23rd, 2002
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
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Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) looked up to his retailer dad (Christopher Walken), who loved to regale his son with the story of how he among many won the beautiful eighteen year old Frenchwoman (Nathalie Baye, "Venus Beauty Institute") who would become Frank Jr.'s mom at the end of WWII. When his father's business fails and his mom divorces his dad, Frank Jr. runs away at home at the age of sixteen and becomes a legendary con man who taunts the FBI for five years with "Catch Me If You Can."
Director Steven Spielberg shifts from the paranoid future of "Minority Report" to the trusting innocence of the early 1960s with "Catch Me If You Can," a comic cat and mouse story that would be hard to believe if it weren't true. While Spielberg once again visits his recurring theme of the lost child, he's gradually shedding his propensity for manipulative button pushing. "Catch Me If You Can" is a well-acted, stylish production that can only be faulted for the director's familiar inability to find a concise way to end his film.
Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson ("Rush Hour 2") does, however, find the perfect way to begin the movie, using the TV series 'To Tell the Truth' to present us with the facts that Abagnale Jr. successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer and passed fake checks totaling millions all before his 21st birthday. We then flash back to Frank's early years of family drama.
Frank is the proudest person in the room when his dad is honored at a rotary meeting by its president Jack Barnes (James Brolin), but dismayed when he finds Jack at home with his mother when he returns home from school one day. Frank's genius for the con has already been displayed when he protects himself from school bullies by pretending to be a substitute French teacher for a week. When he's forced to choose which parent to live with, he runs from New Rochelle to New York City and begins passing bad checks using the account his dad opened for his birthday. He poses as an eager high school journalist to get inside info from Pan Am, scams a uniform and begins flying from city to city cashing forged Pan Am paychecks. Hot on his trail is Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), a humorless FBI agent with a love of bureaucracy which makes him the perfect paper trail hunter.
Frank uses his dad's charming ploys to get his way with the ladies until a move to Atlanta and a new job as an ER supervisor crosses his path with Brenda (newcomer Amy Adams), a naive candy striper estranged from her parents who Frank feels compelled to protect. Just as Frank is about to get a family back, having healed Brenda's rift with her folks, Hanratty catches up with him and he flees again before a final showdown.
Spielberg and Nathanson balance Frank's exploits with his need for a father figure and family. Once Hanratty learns the genius 'paperhanger' he's after is only a kid, his admiration and determination are joined by a desire to protect and rehabilitate the damaged youth. He's an obvious father figure, who in real life did help Abagnale learn to make his living on the right side of the law. The filmmakers also inject a little of the 1940s Woo Woo Kid into Frank Jr., who proclaims 'this is the best date I ever had!' after bedding a willing stewardess.
DiCaprio is perfectly cast as the boy who could pass for a professional. He downshifts from suave ladies' man to needy child looking for acceptance smoothly and can make wistful avoid overt sentimentality. He also slips on various accents to suit his various personas. Hanks is
great as the Joe Friday whose passion for paper makes his coworkers roll their eyes. He gives Carl a flat drawl and ramrod posture. Christopher Walken maintains an air of eternal hope, even when his American dream has crashed and burned. Nathalie Baye makes Frank's mother a woman looking for the next party, an unsentimental opportunist the opposite of the man she first married. Amy Adams invests Brenda with an innocence Frank has lost and a neediness that equals his own.
Director of photography Janusz Kaminski ("Minority Report") and production designer Jeannine Oppewlal ("Pleasantville") give the film a colorfully sunny look which is also reflected in Mary Zophres hip costume design. On his twentieth collaboration with Spielberg, composer John Williams delivers a doozy of a score with bouncy jazz riffs for the hep cats of the period. The soundtrack also includes such period touchstones as "The Girl From Impanema" and Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me."
B+
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