The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

Catch Me if You Can

By Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005. His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

Catch Me If You Can is Steven Spielberg's best film in more than a decade; it has all of the nonchalant command of his finest entertainments, from Jaws (1975) to the Indiana Jones trilogy (1980, 1984, 1989), while making a welcome return to the sound classical Hollywood language that was the bread and butter of his '70s work. Clocking in at well over two hours, this breezy entertainment never feels weighted down: it is high comedy and sentimental indulgence on the order of Capra or Truffaut (one of whose favorite actresses, Nathalie Baye, is cast here in a supporting role). The film is set in the early '60s, when the true story upon which it is inspired took place. Although the film glosses over anything resembling a rigorous political vision of the period--which is unfortunate, though so par the course for this filmmaker it perhaps isn't even worth mentioning--the aesthetic pleasures of the era are in full abundance, from the wonderfully evocative animated title sequence and jazz-themed score by John Williams to a million fondly remembered markers of the period.

Leonardo DiCaprio is cast as Frank Abagnale, Jr., a con artist who wrote over a million dollars worth of false checks under various identities--in the film he is seen posing as a physician, lawyer, and, his favorite of all, a Pan Am copilot with stewardesses clinging to his side--by the time he was seventeen. Encouraged to pursue this way of life after the divorce of his parents (Baye and Christopher Walken), the film is framed in terms of his pursuit by a fatherly FBI agent (Tom Hanks) and Frank's relationship with his own father over the course of several years. One of the film's pleasures is how it resists making Hanks' character a substitute father for Frank, as it makes clear how healthy and loving his relationship with his own father is.

The film has the confident propulsion of an audience satisfying film from Hollywood's golden age of the '40s or '50s as we see Frank again and again dupe the system and fool the authorities; this is highly pleasurable storytelling and it becomes genuinely affecting when the law catches up with him and he finds himself alone in the world (the late sequence, set during Christmastime, of Frank looking through a window at his mother's house, with her new husband and family, has the well earned pathos of a Leo McCarey). Simultaneously, it also represents an extremely welcoming acknowledgment of the filmmaker's essentially adolescent perspective: his lead character flees from emotional strife and heartache to assume the identities of others, the particulars of which he picks up from television shows, comic books, and a certain wily ability to fit in. This may be Spielberg's most autobiographical film.