Catching Billy, If He Can

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2003)

The odd saga of our most successful filmmaker casting about for his artistic persona continues with "Catch Me If You Can". Steven Spielberg, who seems to have used up all his own artistic material years ago (possibly as long ago as "E.T."), has already imitated David Lean ("Schindler's List", "Saving Private Ryan") Stanley Kubrick ("A.I.", "Minority Report"), and even himself ("Jurassic Park") with consistently mixed results; apparently now that Billy Wilder is safely dead, he's next on the list.
But alas, this latest homage is, like all the others, only a strangely muted copy of the original master's work. "Catch Me If You Can" would be the perfect Wilder vehicle - if only the story had been available in Wilder's heyday (it's true, the Wilder of "Avanti!" hacking through it might be a bit dispiriting). As it is, we get all the ingredients of an acidic Wilder farce - a charming cad, a bumbling, upright nemesis, a wittily framed pursuit, the unexpected intrusion of true love, the irony of everybody's moral position, the eventual comeuppance, the final reversal (not to mention the retro title sequence!) without any of the sweet-and-sour sting that made "Sabrina" and "Some Like It Hot" and "The Apartment" and even "One Two Three" so memorable.
What we get instead is another bastard hybrid of Spielberg's sweet, synthetic sympathy and the darker insights of another, better director. Thus Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonard DiCaprio), the con man and scapegrace who swindled people out of millions while fraudulently pursuing the lifestyle of a pilot, a pediatrician, and a lawyer (yes, it's all pretty much true) is sweetened up from the sociopathic user we can feel, instinctively, that he really was, into a lonely youth from a broken home who just somehow hopes to get Mommy and Daddy (the excellent Christopher Walken) back together again. In Spielberg's weirdly paternal (and patronizing) embrace, Frank's strangely passive with women (who fall over him, believably enough, because of his fake credentials), confused and lonely in the grown-up world, and even to be pitied when he's impersonating a doctor in an emergency ward!

All this makes what should have been razor-sharp a bit soft - even a little soggy. What's weirdest is that the material closest to Spielberg's own heart (he, too, was a brilliant, lonely transfer student in high school, as his parents' marriage fell apart) never catches fire either. Only a handful of scenes really shine (DiCaprio's clueless wooing of a high-price hooker, his first ride on a real jet, his deft escape from Hanks in a hotel room) - and these, as usual for Spielberg, hinge on an immature young man taking a scary, thrilling ride. We begin to wonder if this is the only thing Spielberg can really DO. Long ago, in movies like "Jaws" and especially "Sugarland Express", Spielberg was capable of a shaggy, vulgar vitality - remember the mayor of Amity, in his whale-print suit, or Goldie Hawn's entire performance in "Sugarland"? But somehow, after the mystical hooey of "Close Encounters", he lost anything like an adult common touch.

Still, even if Spielberg's no farceur, the movie's not bad - it's even intermittently entertaining. DiCaprio's not good-looking or suave enough for the lead role (and he doesn't really project the kind of white-hot smarts the kid must have had), but he holds his own and scores a point or two every now and then, enough to keep the movie rolling along. Tom Hanks, as the upside-down Javert to DiCaprio's backward Jean Valjean, is convincingly earnest in his struggle to be more than just waddlingly competent. But it's Walken who walks off with the movie, because he's not afraid to give DiCaprio's father a cheap, top-o-the-world-ma kick beneath all the pathos Spielberg keeps pouring over him. When we're watching Walken, we can almost understand his son.
Actually, to be brutally frank, "Catch Me" is probably Spielberg's best movie in years - simply because it's got the best script. For once Spielberg hasn't tampered much with his screenplay in mid-flight (he probably just didn't have time), and Jeff Nathanson has structured a solid (though not streamlined) arc that lands subtle points just where you want them. The film is blessedly unriddled with the kind of bravura "thrill rides" Spielberg inserted almost willy-nilly into "Minority Report", and this time the script's little ironies actually WORK - unlike "Ryan", "Report", and "A.I.", this movie, in its small way, makes thematic sense. It's true the film has one two many climaxes, and is maybe fifteen minutes too long, but for Spielberg, this counts as a big step up in self-discipline. Let's hope he keeps as tight a schedule on his next project (a Hitchcock picture? maybe a Howard Hawks?).