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| Catch Me If You Can |
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  (9/10)
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Runtime: 140 |
| Public Rating: 8.91 (169 votes) |
Director: Steven Spielberg |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: action, drama, crime |
Year: 2002 |
| Writer(s): Frank W. Abagnale & Stan Redding (book), Jeff Nathanson (screenp |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Jennifer Garner, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, Frank John Hughes, Brian Howe, Nathalie Baye.
From the moment the stylish 1960’s jazz music starts and the elegant, up-beat graphics roll this film takes us on a journey to an America of forty years ago, where innocence and optimism combined with opportunism created the kind of environment where a slick operator could get away with just about anything. This impression is aided by a sophisticated score by John Williams (in his 20th for Steven Spielberg) in which, departing from his usual grand style for epic sagas, sci-fi and fantasy, he goes back to his roots with Henry Mancini and recreates the ambience in which the film is set. There is a hint of The Pink Panther (1964) both in the era and in the story of the smart rogue who usually escapes justice.
Based on an almost incredible, true story, it’s about a confidence trickster who impersonated a teacher, an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer and embezzled millions of dollars in forged cheques. What’s more, he did it all in the five years before he turned 21. Following a stint in a French jail, Frank Abagnale returned to the US to be imprisoned there. As if the first part of his life were not remarkable enough, Abagnale subsequently became an advisor on cheque fraud to the FBI, where he remained for another two decades as an honest Government employee. And he wrote a bestselling book about it with the same title.
What Spielberg does with this extraordinary story is bring it to life in a hilarious and completely believable story juxtaposing sympathetic characters in situations that nicely balance adaptive behavioural mechanisms with compulsive emotional and psychological drives. The performances are extraordinary. Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank moves effortlessly from the gormless awkwardness of a sixteen-year-old discovering that his parents’ marriage has irretrievably broken to the suave self-confidence of an air-line pilot almost without breaking his stride. Yet he always has an alert self-awareness, watching the people he is duping to gauge their responses and adjusting accordingly. It’s as though he can’t really believe they are taken in, while his victims respond to this as to a shyness and vulnerability they want to protect and reassure.
Apart from the performances, the film’s strong points are the characters’ clear motivations from which their actions flow so seamlessly and the credibility of each step from Frank’s early hero-worship of his father and emulation of him to his independently perfecting opportunism and deception to a high polish. The humour also is brilliant, with sight gags in abundance. Watch for the scene with a bath full of plastic toy Pan-Am planes, the highly inventive lateral thinking in the use to which they are put, and the stupefyingly lucrative returns. Episodes of Dr Kildare and Perry Mason on TV allow Frank to mould himself like a chameleon. The film uses flashbacks, archival TV footage and contemporary popular songs to maintain verisimilitude while the pacing is appropriately tight.
Christopher Walken plays Frank Abagnale, Sr., a failed idealist who models for his son an eternal optimism and an ability to take advantage of opportunities. Early in the film Frank Sr. accepts a retail award with the story of two mice that fall into a pail of milk. One mouse gives up and drowns, the other struggles and thereby churns the milk into butter, from which it can climb out. When his father's success falls to the vicissitudes of retail business, Frank Jr. takes this parable very seriously. His life becomes a demonstration of it from the moment he walks into a new school and is targeted by a bully, whereupon he immediately adopts a persona of an aloof, authoritarian substitute teacher that he maintains for a week before being found out. Walken’s complex portrayal of a man whose constant disappointment to himself is used as a hidden, self-administered cat o’ nine tails allows him also to laugh secretly in admiration of this, the first of his son’s exploits. Their relationship is one in which each is forever hopelessly trying to make it up, “to get it all back”, for the other. Frank Sr. reacts to pressure by trying to charm his way out; Frank Jr. reacts by assuming the persona of a person in authority, from whom the charm is irresistible. Frank Sr. also teaches his son the suppressed joy in getting away with cheating someone. Ultimately, however, he feels bitterly that he has cheated his son out of the ideal father he should have been.
Nathalie Baye is marvellous as Frank’s French-born mother Paula, whose desires and ambitions are in the end as shallow as her understanding of her son and her parenting skills. Jennifer Garner (Sydney, in TV’s Alias) is both hard and vulnerable as a prostitute who receives far less that she bargained for, while Amy Adams shines as Frank’s innocent fiancée, Brenda. Her father, played by a bluff, beaming Martin Sheen, is the first to whom Frank confesses the truth that he is not who he pretends to be. Naturally, he is not believed, demonstrating Frank’s weary realisation that people believe what they want to believe.
The other outstanding performance is by Tom Hanks as Carl Hanratty, the FBI agent who doggedly pursues Frank through America and Europe. Hanks is so faceless, so colourless that he is utterly convincing as the man whose persistence and lonely single-mindedness finally catches him. Carl has with Frank the only relationship the fugitive can maintain through all his changing identities. Frank trusts him. Carl never lies to him and their annual phone conversations on Christmas Eve are touching because Carl understands Frank in ways no-one else ever has. Seeming to have no other life, Carl’s life is defined solely by his job, by the pursuit of ‘paper-hangers’ like Frank Abagnale. Frank too, has no real life. His personas are defined by their uniforms. He puts on the appropriate manner like a cloak and rarely has an authentic interaction with anyone though it is what he craves. Ultimately it is a complex similarity as well as the way they complement each other that draws the two of them together and allows Carl to take over as a father figure for the younger man.
It is wonderfully ironic that it is the opportunism of the US government, following Carl’s recommendation, that gives Frank Abagnale the job of profiling cheque fraudsters and saves him from a lifetime in jail. The humorous tone of this terrific film and its vibrant light and shade combined with the authenticity of the performances brings home that irony loud and clear.
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