the triumph of lightness

Rating: Null/10 (4 March 2003)

Since Schindler's List, Stephen Spielberg has felt compelled to make Important Movies. Thus the portentous likes of AI and Minority Report have bored moviegoers worldwide. Spielberg' s latest is thankfully more playful than his recent work. And unlike some of his previous films, its less manipulative of the emotions than usual. Ironically Catch Me If You Can's lightness and lack of manipulativeness make its more emotional moments much more effective. Partly this is due to John Williams' soundtrack; usually Spielberg's in-house composer writes rather formulaic orchestra-driven music, but marimbas and glockenspiels and other percussion instruments lead the breezy theme here.
Both AI and Minority Report went on far too long; both could have ended at a point where it was logical and satisfying but chose to carry on and on and on. Catch Me If You Can only possesses this fault of Spielberg's recent work to some extent; the film might have ended ten minutes earlier to no particular disadvantage. It tells the story of Frank Abagnale Junior (di Caprio), son of his namesake upright pillar of the community father (played by Christopher Walken, in one of his less psychotic roles), who runs away from home rather than confront his parents divorce. He learns that forging cheques and impersonating airline pilots and other professionals is much easier than it seems. All it takes is audacity. Inevitably, Abagnale draws the attention of plodding, methodical FBI man Hanratty (Hanks), the FBI's one passionate believer in the importance of cheque fraud.
The opening credits resemble nothing so much as the cover of a 1960s paperback. In a way Catch Me If You Can is a film about the Sixties, but a Sixties slightly different from the image we have of it. Both Abagnale and Hanratty are touched by broken marriages, his parents in the case of Abagnale, his own for the older man. Aside from a few brief references, Vietnam and student radicalism and LSD might as well not exist.
Some might see this as Spielberg closing his eyes to reality, but for me it more accurately reflects what the Sixties must have been like for the great mass of people who actually lived through them. It reminds us that for most people (at least most people who didn't go on to lucrative media careers in which they could endlessly revisit their preoccupations) the Sixties weren't about fashionable radicalism and rioting but a decade where they got on with their lives as most people generally do; working, living, getting married etc. Or in Frank Abagnale Junior's case, impersonating doctors and lawyers and airline pilots and passing fraudulent cheques.