Catch Me if You Can

Are you an intelligent moviegoer who can interpret the significance of events that take place before you on the silver screen? Steven Spielberg doesn't trust you. That's why every film he's made in the past five years has been larded with and hampered by moments in which Spielberg makes sure you know Exactly What This Means that feel like embarrassing, inadvertent displays of auteurish insecurity. Intelligent moviegoers will find this especially frustrating because Spielberg has absolutely no reason to be insecure; he's our modern master at gracefully using artful tactics to make a mass audience understand him.

Fortunately, "Catch Me if You Can," given both the benefit of Spielberg's talent and the curse of his didacticism, shows itself to be a fleet, irrepressible piece of entertainment whose sheer velocity overcomes Spielberg's overdetermination. Mostly. Even though it does star Leonardo DiCaprio.

DiCaprio has rightly been criticized for looking about twelve years old and acting primarily via the use of a facial expression that mostly says "Damn, I'm taking this acting thing seriously!" Here he shelves both the facial expression and that casual immaturity. He has to be immature at first, though, as Frank Abagnale, Jr., the bright-eyed, worshipful son of a predictably named man played by Christopher Walken. Senior is going through a buncha tax trouble, and his wife Paula (Nathalie Baye) doesn't think much of a man who can't keep her in her accustomed style. Unable to face one way or the other when confronted by the truth that his parents are separating, Abagnale Jr. runs. He doesn't stop running until the movie is over.

Of course, you can't just run all your life; you gotta eat. Abagnale begins his life away from home with penny-ante (almost literally) check bouncing, but soon, using a gift for impersonation of bigger shots than he, Pan American Airlines has become his personal front, which he uses to travel the U.S., kiting and rerouting and cashing and splurging. Soon, he's living the life of a very rich man, one in which nothing but the money is real.

The stolen money part brings him to the attention of FBI agent Carl Hanratty, played by Tom Hanks with an butchered Northeastern accent for no obvious reason. Hanratty somehow doggedly fights through his verbal implausibilities to get one step behind Abagnale's brazen fraud. But even Hanratty is dazzled by Abagnale's invention; the only one who doesn't seem blinded is Abagnale's dad, who on intermittent meetings sees directly through all his son's charades. The chase is on. But to what end?

This movie doesn't work if DiCaprio can't make all that impostering and blustering and hairsbreadth-escaping both plausible and seductive, but surprisingly enough he pulls it off; he's got both a protean exterior ready and willing to feel out his surroundings and put himself in whatever form he's expected to take, and an inner pain from not knowing in which form he belongs. But he's not uncomplicatedly morose; he enjoys his fantastic life and the skill with which he makes it up out of thin air, even as he sees where it leads. Hanks really should not be using that accent, but otherwise is remarkably dogged, a fine contrast to DiCaprio's brio. Walken, not playing a psycho for once, makes Senior both a faded man and a vivid character, someone you can really see Junior looking up to even as the rest of the world looks down on him.

The actors are aided in their labors by Jeff Nathanson's remarkable adaptation of the book by Abagnale and Stan Redding; the script begins in medias res and zips back and forth with fluency and inevitability, with dialogue that allows DiCaprio maximum room to bluff and charm. And John Williams quits with his latter-day quasi-New Age pap (as in "A.I." and the Harry Potter films) and unrepentantly steals from some real composers, like Aaron Copland and Dave Brubeck, to push the film along with nervy ostinatos.

And, of course, Spielberg deserves credit for all of the above virtues (and demerit for allowing Hanks that accent). He ably paces the action, which feels fast without ever becoming breathless, and gives his actors space to delineate their characters. Though the narrative seems to skip some necessary scenes towards the end—some decisions contributing to Abagnale's fall are pretty much unexplained—he doesn't let the film run off the rails and provides some stunning final scenes. With assistance from cinematographer extraordinaire Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg lets us know a lot about the narrative with simple yet precise images; a subtle halo surrounds Abagnale Sr. the first time he appears, for example, and the first cut is to Abagnale Jr. He doesn't cue it up in your mind, but the resonance is there.

But he does cue up a lot of other resonances, rather sloppily, by letting a bunch of pivotal scenes occur at Christmastime and allowing a few characters to say one line too many in making their plot points and just giving absolutely no indication that he thinks anyone watching in movieland will feel the pathos of the broken parent-child bond unless he tells them to. These moments stick with you, as times when the movie—not the characters, the film—lost its poise and its cool. And that's really sad, that Spielberg either doesn't think he's good enough or doesn't think we're good enough to have the message come through without such pointed explanations.

"Catch Me if You Can" comes so very close to being unassailable big-time cinematic fun with a seamless message slipped inside that you're more disappointed when Spielberg can't avoid his Exactly What This Means moments than if the film were just flat-out bad. After all, we see flat-out bad films all the time; even if the chase is still plenty fun, rarely do we see a film come so close to catching cinematic greatness.

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