Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can

Directed by Steven Spielberg

A comma belongs in the title of Catch Me If You Can, Steven Spielberg’s defiant new movie that goes back to the 1960s–the era conservative commentators point to as starting America’s decline–to show the complicated, forgotten roots of our contemporary social frustration. Spielberg dashes ahead of all this season’s movies–Antwone Fisher, Gangs of New York, About Schmidt, 25th Hour, Far from Heaven, Auto Focus, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, The Hours; even the best of which barely articulate the connection between society and family, politics and culture, history and the present. Telling the true story of Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a con artist who switched identities, posed as an airline copilot, doctor, lawyer and cashed millions of dollars in bogus checks before he was 21 years old, Spielberg locates the American myth of ceaseless ambition in the neurosis of a boy attempting to emulate, please and avenge his father.

Abagnale’s criminal exploits (played as innocent eagerness by Leonardo DiCaprio) spring from a desire to hold his broken family together. His father (Christopher Walken) is a war vet, a businessman and native huckster who married a French woman (Nathalie Baye) during the Liberation but loses her when he is hounded for tax evasion. That evasiveness is a trait the son shares and Frank Jr.’s restlessness and imagination inspire Spielberg’s bounding narrative. Catch Me If You Can moves like one of the Indiana Jones films–especially evoking The Last Crusade’s interplay of a son’s impetuousness and a father’s wisdom. Abagnale’s nonstop adventures are, in part, a search for a more stable father figure and he finds it in Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), the FBI agent who stalks him. At every moment of Abagnale’s filial panic, the story’s flashback structure returns to the "present" where he is in Hanratty’s custody–always a moment of self-reflection.

This way Spielberg defuses regular con-artist plot mechanisms; there’s little suspense about Abagnale being caught or a trick going wrong as in The Sting yet Catch Me If You Can is so charming and watchable that some viewers will concentrate on Abagnale’s gimmicks and ignore his desperation, the key to the movie’s gravity. With every pulse of the film’s forward movement, you’re meant to think about the psychology underlying the young trickster’s stunts. This constant repositioning of con-game delight signifies the film’s moral advance (the cultural progress other filmmakers hereafter will have to catch up to). Spielberg returns the good name to "entertainment"–seriously damaged in the Michael Bay era–by offering more than entertainment.

Catch Me If You Can exudes immense cultural awareness. I can’t recall another film that so reveled in pop experience while also scrutinizing its folly except for Jonathan Demme’s 1986 Something Wild. This could be considered Spielberg’s Demme movie for the felicitous way it braids together class and sex and genre but, in fact, these themes are always at the heart of Spielberg’s most expansive fiction (1941, The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun). It is exciting to see an entire era recreated this way–not just surface detail (the opening scene of a To Tell the Truth tv broadcast) but also the spirit of the times. Spielberg’s breathtaking evocation of the past only works because the period artifacts and settings are authentically expressive of the human experience he depicts.

Of the film’s many extraordinary moments, one stands out for refusing disingenuous Hollywood convention: after Abagnale’s sexual initiation, he resumes grifting with a new gleam in his eye, an increased appreciation for the women he sees and the avaricious potential that lies before him. Spielberg shoots this as a long pan across a row of female bank tellers, intercutting Abagnale’s avid awareness. It helps to have a real movie star like DiCaprio put this across yet most moviemakers never get this rite-of-passage–and it’s central to Spielberg’s vivid demonstration of American ambition and Abagnale’s preening innocence. Musical and visual cues are part of the rush: "The Girl from Ipanema," "The Look of Love," "Come Fly with Me," even a tonally consistent interpolation of the movie Goldfinger. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski brackets the story in monochromes but the mid-60s flashbacks have the stylized, ecstatic look of Sinatra album covers. John Williams’ light-jazz score is like the experimental ones he used to write for Altman though it also suggests The Pink Panther theme shot through with intrigue.

Plaintiveness takes Catch Me If You Can beyond simple nostalgia; it captures the tangled essence of American desire. In Abagnale’s fascination with flight (to escape the stifling working class), he fetishizes airline pilots–uniformed masculine figures of professionalism, prowess and progress. A dazzling airport ruse with Abagnale in the midst of smiling stewardesses reveals how these jobs brimmed with postwar promise. Although that’s the opposite of the 60s hippie myth, Spielberg’s vision is wide-eyed and wide-ranging; it includes the era’s newly opened-up social landscape. A hospital sequence in Atlanta features a black kid in an emergency room bearing a gruesome leg wound. Abagnale stares at it and asks the interns around him, "Do you concur?" Similarly the entire film asks what we assent to in our political legacy. It’s the Trent Lott question posed by a socially aware pop artist, particularly as he examines a morally challenged kid like Abagnale.

That the story keeps coming back to the father’s influence is crucial. Spielberg (and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, who wrote Rush Hour 2) investigates Abagnale’s personal motivation through symbols most filmmakers ignore. Wendell B. Harris’ extraordinary con-man movie Chameleon Street (an obvious influence on this film) hinted at the significance of patriarchy then explored individual psychology. Catch Me roots its drama in the father-son dynamic to keep Abagnale from being viewed too romantically. DiCaprio and Walken match up superbly. When face-to-face, their gentle eyes contrast youth and age, optimism and pain. Walken has spent most of his late career playing hipster fantasy figures but this is the first time since Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral that anyone’s put Walken in a credible moral context. The way DiCaprio’s delicate features verge into Walken’s tormented face illustrates that sons who seek guidance sometimes look upon a void. ("Ask me to stop!" the boy insists.)

Yet, Abagnale’s sense of family responsibility persists–even when misguided. His vaguely criminal tendencies are endemic and likened to the IRS’ unfairness. ("It’s illegal what they’re doing to us!" Abagnale’s mother says. "They ate the cake, now they want the crumbs," the father groans.) Spielberg knows we have as ambivalent a relationship to government as to our parents. That’s where Hanks’ Hanratty takes over. This responsible, dedicated G-man suffers his own broken home (he and Abagnale cross paths on lonely Christmas Eves), yet he provides a sense of conscience and understanding–a second father-figure. Their law-and-order dynamic suggests a Road Runner cartoon written by Mark Twain. The moral complexity they exhibit is funny and emotional: crafting his first phony check, Abagnale presses it inside a Gideon Bible. Hanratty takes a Boy Scout oath before Abagnale, but Spielberg conveys it as Trust and Admiration. Essential verities, now as then.

In the nauseatingly hip Blow, a drug dealer chased the American dream hypocritically, narcissistically. It was impossible to enjoy or learn from that movie because of its dishonesty–pandering to the youth audience while pretending rebel, entrepreneurial cred. Abagnale’s habit of collecting labels torn off product containers (Dad’s Root Beer, Spam, Gallo, etc.) more credibly illustrates capitalism’s effect on youth–the influence a consumer culture has on one’s developing identity. In Catch Me If You Can, Abagnale’s elusiveness derives from this product- and media-oriented lack of emotional connection. Like the black protagonist in Chameleon Street, this white youth’s alienation shows in the various guises he assumes. Encountering a former Seventeen magazine model, Abagnale and the girl (Jennifer Garner) are just kids acting out the culture’s cynicism in which parent-child exchange frequently gets reduced to the level of bribes. Meeting cute, these lost kids–a baby whore and a baby thief–barter the cost of things, then themselves. (Their high-fashion shoes meet first.)

The depth and bold social critique in scenes like that are typically ignored by Spielberg-haters who make the unoriginal complaint that he merely promotes the Hollywood system. They’re also the sort of dull-witted moviegoers who miss that a lingering shot of Abagnale’s hotel room number isn’t just a closeup of a door but narrative proof of the room number he gave to Hanratty. What’s more, it’s a visual representation that confides and confesses a character’s feelings. This is the epitome of complex, masterful filmmaking. Catch Me If You Can has a grave, dark undercurrent despite its surface pastels–the pinks, blues, greens, yellows, sunshine. This vision of the life Americans once idealized also measures the distance we’ve gotten away from it. Lazy film-watching and dishonest filmmaking won’t do. Catch Spielberg, if you can.