The Running Man
Well acted but bloated, Catch Me If You Can features some talent, but never hits its stride.
by Michael Sean McGowan
Catch Me If You Can is a movie fueled by a few good performances and an idea that doesn't stay as fresh as Steven Spielberg would have liked it to. Rather unheard of for lighthearted comedic fare, Catch Me clocks in at 140 minutes while Spielberg's masterful summer release, Minority Report, barely tops it with 145. Now, consider for a moment, the amount of plot the twisting Report had to burn through in that running time. Now, consider in comparison, that Catch Me If You Can is just as straightforward (i.e. if you've seen the commercial, you've pretty much seen the movie) as Minority Report was intricate and you realize which of these two offerings is the leaner cut of beef.
Catch Me If You Can actually holds itself together rather well for about 2/3 of its time, but it reaches a point where the story- where the characters- seem to scream to call it quits, but Spielberg is too enamored to let them go and makes the remainder of the movie a one-step-down-from-excruciating slog to an ending that should have come 30 minutes earlier. I know that comedy isn't an area where Spielberg has tried his hand too often, but even P.T. Anderson, known for the 3-hour-plus epics Boogie Nights and Magnolia, managed to make a comedy this year trimmed down to a neat 90 minutes.
We open with the words "Inspired by a true story..." a signal that the story we are going to see was, at one time, at least framed by actual living people. But as is usually the case, once we get the names and plot down, any connection to real life is dropped and we are off to the races. In 1963 New York, Frank Abagnale Jr.(Leonardo DiCaprio) is a sixteen year-old who runs away from home when his parents divorce and embarks on an odyssey of impersonating everything from an airline pilot ("I'm actually just a co-pilot," he tells his father) to a doctor to a lawyer, cashing upwards of $4 million in fake checks before being arrested.
From the tone of the film I can guess that Spielberg was aiming for a throwback to 60s comedic farce, much in the same way Rat Race tried to drag It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World kicking and screaming into the Twenty-First Century. The problem is that Catch Me If You Can isn't airy enough to achieve the level of mad cap and its bloated running time is only part of the problem. As Abagnale criss-crosses the country on his "crime spree," he is pursued by a dogged FBI agent who specializes in bank fraud (Tom Hanks). This character, Carl Hanratty, is one of the movie's fabrications (there was no one person who caught Abagnale) is written in a curious way: his demeanor makes him to be a rather sullen, lonely, almost pathetic man- characteristics that the script seems to believe are self-evident because the man investigates bank fraud for God's sake!
In a Chase movie, the Pursuer has to be equal shades of menacing and human, but that isn't what Catch Me If You Can is trying to be. In a comedy, the Hanratty character should be slightly bumbling, what some would describe as "too clever by half," and constantly rebuffed, humiliated, and frustrated by obstacles falling in his way. Yet while there is no threat in the Hanratty character, there is none of this kind of hard-won joy, either. Hanratty seems to exist only to give Abagnale something to run from. Even if he was a fully evolved character, I'm not sure I'd want to see him in a movie designed to make me smile, anyway.
There is more than a little pathos bleeding through the movie and it isn't all souring. Christopher Walken, best known for playing men with a resolute, if not downright evil, streak, shows surprising vulnerability as Abagnale's world-beaten father. He is a World War II vet who, as the story progresses, plunges further into debt and into trouble with the IRS. In the saddest twist of events, he starts living voyeuristically through his son's lawbreaking and DiCaprio's final plead to him is heart breaking. There is not a lot Walken has done recently that is memorable, but he may be justified in carrying an Oscar nod away from this.
You can tell that Catch Me If You Can banks most of its laughs on its cleverness rather than its material. It takes for granted that audiences will get a laugh seeing Abagnale con a group of women into become stewardesses and feel self-satisfied in the Robin Hood-way his crimes are set up. Large corporations, mostly, seem to be his monetary victims, although in one scene he has to abandon a lonely nurse he has just married when the Feds get too close. These aren't bad assumptions or even incorrect. The miscalculation, though, is how long they will hold up. Without giving too much away, I can say that the movie ends once and then follows a 30 minute denouement, the purpose of which I never quite figured out.
Between this and Gangs of New York DiCaprio is finally putting distance between him and shoddy memories of The Beach. What he does well here is making Frank Abagnale likeable; I believed his devotion to his father, I believed the reality of his slickster facade, I even believed the latent guilt that gets the better of him by the end of the movie. As far as Hanks, I can say that he could have played the character Hanratty should have been. But he is too glum, too weighted, to give the momentum of this movie the spry energy it needed. Above all, a farce needs to be fun and fast, but Catch Me if You Can just doesn't move fast enough to make it worth giving chase. B-