Why did I wait so long?

Rating: Null/10 (2 November 2014)

Steven Spielberg has an astonishing record as both a director and a producer and, since he burst on the scene with "Duel" in 1971, I have seen most of his work, but somehow I managed to miss the 2002 "Catch Me If You Can" which he both directed and produced and only caught up with it 12 years later following a recommendation. I suppose I saw it as one of Spielberg's smaller and lighter works, but it does have a great cast and a cracking story and, at its heart, it has Spielberg's recurrent sympathy for the confused child ("Empire Of The Sun") often from a broken home ("E.T."). Most surprising of all is that essentially this is a true story about how the teenage Frank Abagnale Jr managed to adopt a series of professional personas in order to hustle his way into people's respect and even affection while cashing more than $2.5 million in fraudulent cheques all around the United States and in a couple of dozen other countries.
Leonardo di Caprio - who has played a number of real-life people in his career ("The Aviator", "J Edgar", "The Wolf Of Wall Street") - is excellent as Frank, bringing both charm and cunning to the role. The breathless narrative of the movie was reflected in the shooting schedule (it was filmed in just 52 days), but Jeff Nathanson's screenplay gives the story an emotional thread by repeatedly focusing on the relationship between Frank and the FBI lawman leading the chase Carl Hanratty who is played by Tom Hanks as both the mirror-image to Frank in style and motivation and increasingly a father figure to the teenager who has lost his real father.