Note to self: Make a lot of fake checks, buy James Bond suit, work for FBI.

Rating: 9/10 (18 January 2003)

The latest film from Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks is much more than a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio, who is granted the most screen time by far, it is a massively entertaining film about the true life adventures (and I should think that the word Â‘adventures' should apply here in all possible meanings) of Frank Abagnale Jr., a brilliant young man who's con artist abilities are revealed in a thrilling early scene where he impersonates a substitute teacher, going so far as to turn away the real substitute when she shows up to teach class.
We are not shown how he is caught after committing this relatively small-time offense, because the last thing we want in our minds about this character is how he gets caught at something. Instead, we see his parents sitting in the principal's office, where the principal reveals to them that their son has been teaching class for the last week, assigning homework, having parent/teacher conferences, and was even planning a field trip. His mother is furious, as most mothers would be, being, I think, the real rulers of the house, while his father was proud of his son's sneakiness as, I also think, many fathers would be (except for the uptight ones, of course). I know MY father would have loved it if I managed something like that in high school.
(spoilers) It seems that Frank has a brilliant mind that he applies to not the mot legal avenues, and his home life is less than wonderful. He comes home one day to discover his mother having an affair with one of his father's friends, and when he eventually finds out, instead of writing a name on that little form to choose which parent he wanted to live with, he jumps out the window and runs away, beginning the adventure that we learn about during the rest of the movie. Granted, Catch Me If You Can is one of those films where the plot from beginning to end is revealed in the preview (kind of like Pleasantville), but it is still a thrilling ride, which is a testament to the talent involved with it.
One of the most interesting elements of the movie is the way it is structured. It knows that it is a predictable film, not only because it starts at the end but because it is a true story and true stories that end tragically are not made into movies (at least not by Spielberg), so the chronology is mixed up at several points during the film. We start at the end, go back to the beginning for a while, go back to just before the end, a little past the end, back to the middle, etc. Not necessarily in that order, but the way the chronological order of events is skewed in the film makes it refreshing even if we already know what it going to happen.

The only problem that I had with the movie was that, despite its ending, there were several things about the movie that were just too convenient. As only a single example, there is a scene late in the film when Frank is being transported back home from France to go to prison in America, and after finding out that his father fell down the stairs and died, he runs into the bathroom, escapes from the plane Commando-style in broad daylight, and runs on foot all the way back to his house. I realize that the movie takes place before cell-phones and even in the early days of two way radios, but you would think that it would not take the FBI the ENTIRE DAY to get to his house, the most obvious place that he was headed. In real life, there would have been squad cars waiting for him long before he jogged back, which makes me wonder how this particular detail played out in real life, if it did at all.
Either way, it is clear that this scene is, as they say, dramatized for effect, which makes you wonder how much of the rest of the story is as well. There is also one other scene that sticks out for this reason like a bright red flag. About two thirds of the way through the film, virtually the entire staff of the FBI are at the Miami airport, because this is the only airport that Abagnale will use (the only reason given for this, by the way, is because this is the airport where Hanratty, the agent assigned to capture Abagnale, has set up his stake-out). They are looking everywhere for Abagnale to show up, and after his girlfriend sets him up, he goes to local universities signing up a whole crew of flight attendants for a two-month flight attendant training tour throughout Europe.
We are never told how he managed to get PanAm to let these fraudulent attendants on the plane when they show up at the airport, or where their uniforms came from, or whether they were all on the same flight or PanAm was nice enough to spread them throughout their entire airline corporation, but the gimmick is that Abagnale is able to walk through the entire airport surrounded by gorgeous young women, and all the police officers and FBI agents their to capture him would be so distracted by all the hotties that they wouldn't even notice him.
So here's problem #1: Abagnale is going for the art of invisibility, and there are few things less invisible than a lot of beautiful young women wearing matching pink uniforms. Very few things, in fact, would attract MORE attention to his little group of followers. Problem #2: If you see a whole group of beautiful young women wearing matching pink uniforms walking in a grinning little group with only a single male within the group, that male attracts at least as much attention as the women. Meaning, if you see that many women walking and giggling together and they are only with a single man, not many people wouldn't be scrambling to see who that man is. In both cases, Abagnale might as well hold up a blinking sign with his name on it.
Of course, as with many other scenes within the movie that are just entirely too convenient, Hanratty is on the phone and facing away just as Abagnale walks by with his big pink group of buddies, but has the brilliant foresight to have a look-alike waiting outside with a big sign with Hanratty's name on it, another little detail more than likely added to the story for our amusement in the film version. Like I said, a lot of this stuff is not very likely to have happened, at least not exactly as we see it in the movie, in real life, but it's also not entirely without effect and not entirely unappreciated.
Spielberg is America's most popular director, and in this movie he proves that he knows how to present a chase. A good chase film has to be structured with a series of close calls and more comfortable moments. You remember this in The Fugitive, for example, when Richard Kimble is cornered by Sam Gerard in the tunnel on the dam, only to escape by jumping off right in front of him. There is a wonderful scene in Catch Me If You Can where Hanratty finds Abagnale's hotel room and bursts in with a gun, at which point we are sure there's no escape, but Frank manages to impersonate a CIA officer right in front of Hanratty, an agent for the FBI, and narrowly escapes, to the audience's great delight. Again, not exactly the most believable stuff in the world, but it sure is fun.
Leonardo DiCaprio has made a tremendous leap both in his choice of roles to play and in his acting skills as a whole. He has certainly come a long way from his chokingly awful performance in Titanic, to play a role in Catch Me If You Can that he seems born to play. The only problem with him in this role is that he is a 28-year-old actor who happens to be able to pass for a 16-year-old kid, when what the part needs is a 16-year-old actor who can, when necessary, pass for a 28-year-old man. Tom Hanks, on the other hand, is absolutely flawless in his role as the driven FBI agent determined to capture Abagnale, even if he asks him nicely to leave him alone. And I don't want to hear any complaints about Hanks' accent, because he captured it beautifully. If you really want to whine and moan about a well-known actor doing a fake accent, watch Thirteen Days.
Overall, Catch Me If You Can has some flaws, it has a few scenes that go beyond the expected suspension of disbelief, but these scenes seem to have just been too ambitious in a movie that maybe was turning out even better than expected. In that sense, these scenes are little more than a slight excursion over the top, while the movie as a whole shines and entertains, even for the slightly lengthy running time. It was a sad and moving scene when Frank's father's death was revealed, and his mother strangely disappeared in the movie into the oblivion of her marriage to her father's friend (the one she had been having the affair with), but as a whole the movie is wonderful entertainment for the whole family.