Catch Me if You Can is a prolonged chase scene that catches its breath during annual Christmas breaks, when Frank and Carl have taunting but deep-down lonesome chats over the phone, and the director is happy to keep his foot on the gas pedal throughout. This is the film this summer's Minority Report wanted to be but couldn't, given that it was lugging around so much portentous sci-fi baggage it could barely lift its arms. Spielberg, for now, has moved out from behind the lecturer's podium and stepped back onto the entertainer's stage.
You'd even be forgiven for dismissing it as harmless fun, as so many did last year with Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven; when a master craftsman has such a good time without breaking a sweat, it's easy to mistake the result for something fluffy and inconsequential. Beneath the giddy, shiny sheen lies a tale of deeper emotional resonance -- a boy on the run from parents real and surrogate -- but Spielberg doesn't seem to mind if you miss it, if you catch only the glee in his step and the glint in his lens. The movie bounds from location (a polished New York City) to location (a blinding Miami); Frank bounds from girl (Alias' Jennifer Garner as model-turned-hooker) to girl (Amy Adams as a good-hearted nurse and sucker); and Spielberg bounds back and forth from year to year.
Frank becomes a con man with good reason, so he figures; he's not out to scam for the hell of it, not really, but to win the respect of his dad (Christopher Walken, more affable and compassionate than ever) and to repair his parents' failed marriage. He figures that if he can make enough scratch, he can get his father out from beneath the government's withering glare -- Frank Sr. is being chased himself on charges of tax fraud and forced to close his store in upstate New York -- and restore his diminished dignity. But Frank Jr., who picked up petty cons from the old man and polished them into perfection, doesn't realize some marriages don't work. He's merely a kid pretending to be an adult, and beneath the nicked pilot's uniform and forged Harvard degree and check-making machines is just a romantic naif whose life experiences are also stolen -- and worthless. DiCaprio, looking like a teen-beat Bond, gives Frank Jr. real soul; you feel for the kid and root for him, even when he's breaking law after law.
Both the movie and the 1980 book upon which Jeff Nathanson (Speed 2, Rush Hour 2) based his screenplay exaggerate and, in Abagnale's own words, overdramatize Frank Jr.'s life: Hanratty never existed, Frank Jr. never ran to avoid choosing between mother and father, and the charming young criminal who became law enforcer has long since disavowed his life of larceny. "I consider my past immoral, unethical, and illegal," he writes on www.abagnale.com. But Spielberg doesn't let the truth stand in the way of a good time, and there's nothing criminal about that.