"Catch Me If You Can"

If only Spielberg had been able to groove on that same vibe. Something in him balks at making a simple celebration of deceptiveness. He and screenwriter Nathanson turn Frank into another of Spielberg's lonely, misunderstood kids, running away from the pain of a broken home, living out the dreams his beloved, hapless father couldn't realize. As Christopher Walken plays Frank Sr. -- which is superbly -- you can almost buy it. You know immediately where his son's dreamer streak comes from when, for probably the umpteenth time, Frank Sr. recounts the story of how he plucked his wife, Paula, from the tiny French village where he laid eyes on her dancing in a small club. And when he twirls Paula around the living room, you know why she fell for him.

Except for his show-stopping number in "Pennies From Heaven," Walken's talents as a hoofer have been criminally underused in movies. Watching him glide his wife around their living room provides "Catch Me If You Can" with one true, fleeting moment of bliss. You just want the movie to stop so you can watch Walken go on dancing. Perhaps it's that strange, innate reserve of Walken that allows him to play this man without lapsing into sentimentality, and why you allow your heart to break a little for him. This is Walken's most touching performance.

Though "Catch Me If You Can" isn't badly made, the fun slowly leaks out of the movie. There's a peculiar sequence involving Jennifer Garner (of the TV series "Alias") as a hooker Frank picks up in a swank hotel. Spielberg simply seems too uptight to enjoy the thought of his hero enjoying a night of sex with a high-class call girl, and though it ends with a comic fillip, it feels awkward, distinctly uneasy. And I couldn't figure out why Frank falls so hard for the drippy little candy-striper (Amy Adams) he meets while posing as a doctor. (Though it's fun watching him con her father, played by Martin Sheen. Sheen is such a dull actor, such a repository of virtue, that something in you just begs to see the young sheik DiCaprio put one over on him.)

What really bogs the movie down is the symbiotic relationship that builds up between Frank and Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), the straight-arrow FBI agent who pursues him. Instead of playing up the joy of this cat-and-mouse chase, something that Abagnale and Hanratty probably both enjoyed on some level, Spielberg turns the pursuit into a way to expose the loneliness of each of these characters. Hanks, who uses a bad Boston accent, gets some humor out of this no-nonsense Fed (especially when the two agents working with him complain that he's humorless). But you don't ever really believe the performance because you're too aware of the way Hanks is squeezing it into Carl's horn-rimmed glasses and Robert Hall suits. Carl works on Christmas Day to escape the pain of his busted-up marriage, and Frank increasingly despairs of a life on the run, calling Carl each Christmas because there's nobody else for him to call.

That may indeed be the story of Frank Abagnale's life. But in a movie that promises us the chance of vicariously enjoying the material pleasures that a scam artist was able to surround himself with, it's a bummer. Abagnale was finally caught in the late '60s and sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. He got out when he agreed to bring his expertise to the FBI's check-fraud investigations. Today he's a leading security consultant. That's a great irony -- the con man who's so good he winds up working for the very people who put him behind bars. It's the ultimate validation of Frank's fantasies -- a fake pilot, fake doctor and fake lawyer who winds up as a real-life G-man. But somehow Spielberg misses the irony. He plays Frank's redemption straight.

There was a scene in Oliver Stone's bloated and ludicrous "Nixon" where Anthony Hopkins' Tricky Dick is flirting with a hooker at some political smoker. When the girl asks him whether he likes jazz, Nixon replies, "Sure. Guy Lombardo." Spielberg isn't that much of a square. But he's made a movie that trudges when it should swing. I left "Catch Me If You Can" longing for the American looniness that Robert Zemeckis might have brought to it at one point, or that Joe Dante probably still could. Spielberg has lost the pop-culture buzz, the love of our own native fantasy life in which those directors specialize. "Catch Me If You Can" is well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.

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