"Catch Me If You Can"

Leonardo DiCaprio looks great in those '60s threads, but Steven Spielberg's story of a legendary hustler is sadly short on period zip, zowie and va-va-voom.

By Charles Taylor

Dec 25, 2002 | There's an irony buried in "Catch Me If You Can" of which even the director, Steven Spielberg, may not be aware. Spielberg has often been accused of making movies that pine nostalgically for a simpler American past. But the pining in "Catch Me If You Can," set in the 1960s, is for a time before the widespread use of computer technology, when it was so much easier to bilk people.

"Catch Me If You Can" is an ode to con games and larcenous behavior, to a time when a smart scam artist could take advantage of the way banks and businesses were willing to cash checks for anyone who looked respectable. Written by Jeff Nathanson, it is based on the autobiography of Frank Abagnale Jr., who in his teens and early 20s became one of the country's youngest and most successful con men, passing millions in fraudulent checks and posing as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer.

Frank (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is the son of a charming but strictly small-time businessman, Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken), who isn't above a harmless con to get what he wants. But Frank Sr.'s tax-fraud problems catch up with him and eventually wreck his marriage to the French beauty (Nathalie Baye) he brought home from World War II. As the movie tells it, Frank Jr. runs away from home when his parents divorce, begins passing bad checks as a simple means of survival, and graduates from there to impersonating any profession that's imbued with a certain amount of glamour.

It's good to see Spielberg working on a piece of sheer entertainment instead of tackling another of the big "serious" subjects that have turned his career into a series of prestige events. And it's good to see him working on something that's essentially optimistic. (Fascinating as "Minority Report" was, it felt strained because Spielberg is not an instinctive pessimist.)

"Catch Me If You Can" starts off on a sleek, sprightly note with an elegantly animated credit sequence, done in tones of blue and black, in which a chameleon con artist is pursued by a G-man. It's like a '60s luxe version of "Spy vs. Spy." Composer John Williams temporarily abandons his routine bombast for a theme in which nervous noir scherzos evoke the music that Bernard Herrmann composed for Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."

For a while, the movie takes real pleasure in watching DiCaprio's Frank pull off his grifts. When a couple of bullies give him trouble the first day at his new school, he simply strides into the classroom, announces himself as the new substitute French teacher and takes over. It's such a ballsy, ingenious scheme that even Frank Sr. can't help but smile in admiration when he hears about it.

Young Frank is a crooked version of one of the boy dreamers and adventurers who've long populated Spielberg's movies. We've always seen toys in the rooms of Spielberg's kids, and here we see a gaggle of toy airplanes soaking in Frank's bathtub. The difference is that Frank is soaking the tiny Pan Am logos off these planes and affixing them to checks. His impersonation of a pilot, and later a doctor and a lawyer, are simply a kid's version of dress-up taken too far. Frank is in love with the way people look at him in his pilot's uniform or doctor's white smock, like a young god. He doesn't feel any animosity or contempt for the people he's fooling; he wants them to like him, and he basks in their adoration.

A wild kid who's in love with the appearance of things -- not just with how he looks in uniform but with how he looks in good suits and fancy hotel suites and fine restaurants -- is a great subject for a movie, since movies are themselves in love with alluring surfaces. And Spielberg has been smart enough to cast another alluring surface, Leonardo DiCaprio, in the role. That's not to slight DiCaprio as an actor. He's very good here, and often quite touching. But the meaning of the movie is in his baby-smooth good looks.

When Frank, posing as an airline pilot recruiting stewardesses, strides through an airport with 10 good-looking girls in uniform, DiCaprio beams the contentment of a boy pasha. There's very little self-satisfaction to Frank. Underneath his confident exterior, he's got the gee-whiz excitement of a kid who can't believe he's getting away with it. It may be morally lazy to say that we like Frank because he's scamming banks and hotels and corporations instead of bilking old ladies out of their Social Security checks. After all, the millions he scammed came out of somebody's pockets. But of all the amoral temptations the movie throws in our path, thievery is the hardest to resist, especially when it lets us live out our dreams of a lush life.

Next Page: The movie's one true moment of bliss: See Christopher Walken dance with his wife!

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