Con Man Caught in 'Catch Me If You Can'

Author: Vlad Lodoaba

You'd think that people learn something from the experience of banging their head really hard against a wall, but that doesn't seem to be the case with Steven Spielberg.
His "A.I." was a crash-and-burn movie, mainly because of its unjustified length and the soporific attempts at cheap melodrama, often at the expense of character development, and the same features are apparent, even if to a lesser extent, in his 2002 movie "Catch Me if You Can."
"Catch Me if You Can" is based on the real story of Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio), a brilliant kid from a middle-class (dysfunctional) family who runs away from home and chooses a life of crime.
Abagnale becomes an accomplished fraudster and conman, impersonates an airline pilot, a doctor, a lawyer and an FBI agent. He makes a fortune by forging checks and appropriating funds from various corporations - already a bonus with a target audience formed of rebel teenagers and civil rights fighters who want to bring down the corporate order.
By now the plot should sound a bit like "The Talented Mr. Ripley", or "Ocean's Eleven": never has impersonating someone else seemed so easy, nor has taking from the rich and giving to oneself so attractive.
Sadly, while "Catch Me If you Can" emulates both those movies, it lacks drama and excitement. The high-intensity, cat-and-mouse game between Abagnale and the FBI agent Carl Hanratty, brilliantly played by Tom Hanks, is often interrupted by irrelevant sub-plots, side-stories and made confusing by the flashback narrative. Throughout the movie, Abagnale tries to get his parents back together, which is touching, but hardly relevant to the plot or to Abagnale's motivations for his actions.
"Catch Me if You Can" starts in the late 60s, as Abagnale is eventually caught by Hanratty somewhere in France. Then, Abagnale's story is revealed through a series of flashbacks, poorly constructed and still leaving the audience with unanswered questions after 140 minutes. When he is only a teenager, in the early 60s, Abagnale is pushed to a life of crime by his parents' divorce and their attempt to commit him to one parent or the other.
He puts a lot of time and care into impersonating his characters, he learns everything there is to know about planes by doing "interviews" for his school paper with the pilots, then becomes a convincing doctor by watching "Dr. Kildare" ("ER" for those of you less familiar with the marvels of your parents' favorite TV dramas), and swiftly adopts the judicial language used by Perry Mason.
All this time, Abagnale travels throughout America, keeps the FBI off his tracks, tries to get his parents back together and manages to find true love. Ain't that cute. How can we not sympathize with a sweet, vulnerable, misguided kid such as DiCaprio's Frank Abagnale? Especially since he only steals from corporations, and not one innocent person is hurt.
And to show what a good guy he is, Abagnale calls Hanratty every year on Christmas Eve to ask him about his estranged daughter, eventually establishing a friendship between the two. Well, the audience is forced to sympathize with Abagnale for lack of any other choice.
Hanratty, the FBI agent, is a clever and serious man, but also deadly dull. Hanks is really good at making the Feds look like a bunch of blundering imbeciles (his pathetic attempts to get the gun out of an oversized holster are classic). In these conditions, we really don't have much freedom in whom we choose to sympathize with.
Of course, by the end of the movie, Abagnale is caught and sentenced to a very long time in prison. The FBI, and Abagnale's old friend Hanratty, realize the teenager's brilliance and decide to recruit him for their Fraud Department.
And here is where the stretch of imagination comes: after more than two hours of making the audience an accomplice, Abagnale's clever outmaneuvers of the FBI, Spielberg now wants us to believe that Frank has turned good and, given the possibility, he will not try to escape - with the characters lacking any sort of psychological depth, we can hardly be blamed for refusing to accept this.
Although it has many flaws, "Catch Me if You Can" is not a horrible film to watch. It's lighthearted, humorous, brilliant at recreating the atmosphere and the costumes of the 60s (although the hippies are conspicuously absent). The opening credits are a clever pastiche of Pink Panther shows, and who can say "no" to the Pink Panther?
Grade: 7.5 out of 10.