Catch this one if you can

Steven Spielberg isn't making history with his latest film, but he sure is having a lot of fun.

By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published December 24, 2002

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Steven Spielberg loosens up considerably with Catch Me If You Can, an amiable break from the historical reverence and social commentary that occupied most of his previous decade as a filmmaker. Spielberg is having fun having nothing important to say, so much so that the movie is at least 30 minutes too long.

	Leonardo DiCaprio, right, plays Frank Abagnale, who impersonates a doctor, as well as a pilot and a lawyer, as part of his check-cashing schemes.
[DreamWorks photos]	Tom Hanks plays tireless FBI agent Carl Hanratty on the trail of Abagnale

Spielberg also sidesteps the cinematic shorthand developed throughout his career: inspirational lighting effects and wide-screen vistas encouraging the audience to cheers or tears. Even the director's favorite composer, John Williams, tones down his sentimentality, creating a jazzy score that Henry Mancini would appreciate. Catch Me If You Can is an example of a filmmaker growing by temporarily regressing, something only a genius would need to do.

Based on true events, Catch Me If You Can traces the criminal career of Frank Abagnale Jr., played by Leonardo DiCaprio with minimal brood and maximum charm. Frank was a supreme con artist in his day, posing as a variety of professionals, at first to cash bad checks, then to forge an identity. Frank's day was the swinging '60s, when a Pan Am pilot's uniform was an aphrodisiac and opened bank doors easier than a gun. By age 19, Frank had cashed millions of dollars in bogus checks and bedded more women than James Bond.

Meanwhile, a humorless FBI agent (Tom Hanks, pushing the Bahston accent too hard) is hot on Frank's trail, unable to keep the escape artist in custody when he does catch him. The agent's name is changed to Carl Hanratty for the film, and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson indulges in dramatic license -- and release-date synchronicity -- by having Frank and Carl speak heart-to-heart on the telephone over three years of pursuit. Those manufactured moments slow the film's pace considerably, erasing all tension from the chase.

The lone dramatic thread connecting Catch Me If You Can to any of Spielberg's previous films is the issue of divorce. Frank's compulsion to fool people and steal is fueled more by a desire to reunite his parents than by ego or greed. That means spending a lot of time analyzing the failure of their marriage, distracting from Frank's crime spree once or twice too often. The effect is like inserting scenes from Kramer vs. Kramer into Ocean's Eleven.

The scenes inside the Abagnale household do provide Christopher Walken with his best role in years, a Kennedy-era businessman whose jaunty air hasn't kept the IRS off his tail. Financial failure is the root of his breakup with a French beauty (Nathalie Baye) brought home from World War II. Walken's halting line delivery is as striking as ever, and he uses it to show the gradual cracking of Frank Sr.'s confidence, a model for his son's deceptions later.

This movie, however, should belong entirely to the relationship between Frank Jr. and Carl as prey and pursuer. The best scenes in Catch Me If You Can show Frank thinking fast on his feet, casually leaping at the next opportunity to live high off somebody else's hog. Carl's best moments occur when he just misses the slippery felon or taunts him with the truth about his loneliness on the lam. Spielberg hasn't played such cat-and-mouse games since The Sugarland Express nearly 30 years ago, but he hasn't lost the touch.

From its plot-revealing, animated opening credits to an uncommon number of postscripts, Catch Me If You Can has an on-the-fly feel that Spielberg fans probably never expected from the director again. But you can tell how much fun he's having. Having no need for perfection or signature moves must be appealing to him, at least for now.

Catch Me If You Can

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen

Screenplay: Jeff Nathanson, based on the book by Frank Abagnale Jr. and Stan Redding

Rating: PG-13; profanity, sexual situations

Running time: 140 min.

Grade: B

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