*** (out of ****)
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Natalie Baye, Amy Adams, James Brolin, and Martin Sheen
Directed by Steven Spielberg & written for the screen by Jim Nathanson, from the book by Frank Abagnale, Jr. and Stan Redding
2002 PG13
The phone rings and it’s someone with a wrong number. A woman asks for Daryl, or Fred, or someone else that doesn’t live here. For a split second I’m tempted to say “that’s me” and just see what happens. Real-life con man Frank Abagnale Jr. essentially did just that, except with jobs, checks, even a fiancé, and lived the sweet life for several years before finally being apprehended for fraud. Before he turned twenty he had passed himself as a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, and a pilot. He did all these things not so much by forging documents but by being affable, modest, and by guessing exactly how people expect a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, or a pilot to act. Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” is a playful romp about seventeen-year-old Frank’s exploits, but it’s also an intriguing, albeit breezy, examination of how much of our social fabric is held together simply by the idea that if you act a certain way, you must have a certain job.
Spielberg wisely does not try to justify Frank’s behavior, but we do like Frank (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) because he is not really a bad boy. He is not diabolical, he has no masterplan, and he’s not trying to hurt anybody. Inventiveness and problem-solving are his two favorite pastimes, and, believe me, most of the teenagers I meet only think hard when they want to get out of doing something. For Frank, the world is a puzzle just waiting to be solved, and when he does solve a little piece of it, he seems to smirk at himself with child-like glee. Look at what I got away with, he seems to be saying. When we see his check-forging apparatus, it involves putting toy planes in the tub so that he can transfer their insignias to fake checks. The entire affair looks more like a model airplane kit than fraud.
Giving the movie greater depth is Christopher Walken as Frank’s father, Frank Sr., who is something of a con man himself, but one who has never succeeded on the scale of his son. He is an admirable father in many respects, long-suffering the infidelities of his wife and his troubles with the IRS. He is both proud and defeated, and develops a mantra with his boy in which they relive the same proud moments from Frank Sr.’s past. At first he can’t help laughing at his son’s ingenuity, but his heart breaks when Frank Jr. becomes wanted by the law.
The law drives a wedge between father and son, and since there is no one else with whom Frank Jr. can share the truth, he begins to form a friendship with the FBI agent (Tom Hanks) who is trailing him. Unlike Frank’s own father, Hanks is an upstanding example of 1950s virtue: honest, hard-working, and a straight-shooter. Puffy with fat, he wears a cheap suit, big glasses, buttons down his collar, and works on Christmas Eve. Hanks never lies to Frank, no matter how often Frank lies to Hanks, and the G-man becomes the kind of authority figure Frank never quite found in his own father.
Spielberg’s style is conventional and energetic without ever drawing attention to itself. Alongside Michael Curtiz and Howard Hawks, Spielberg is one of the greatest “invisible” directors of all time, and that suits “Catch Me If You Can.” Not every movie needs to be packed with self-conscious camera angles and constant reminders about the façade of filmmaking. The movie is filled with period detail, but not overwhelmed by it; we feel this could all happen in our own time as well as the Eisenhower years. The black-suited FBI men come to represent adult responsibility more than governmental authority, and Spielberg has some fun with the goofy way G-men in the ‘50s and ‘60s held their revolvers like dueling sabers.
“Catch Me If You Can” ends in the best possible way, not only with justice being served, but with Frank being genuinely rehabilitated. The G-men in black do not squelch his boyish creativity so much as harness it to society’s benefit. At the film’s end, Frank is working alongside the FBI to catch check frauds; his spirit is not crushed so much as matured, although there are certainly hints that he wouldn’t mind playing some more with the holes in the social fabric.
Finished March 27th, 2003
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