![]() ![]() (Leonardo DiCaprio) took on before his 21st birthday. The soundtrack also includes such period touchstones as "The Girl From Impanema" and Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me."Īirline co-pilot, chief emergency ward physician, school teacher, assistant to the District Attorney of New Orleans and check forger extraordinaire are the careers that Frank Abagnale Jr. On his twentieth collaboration with Spielberg, composer John Williams delivers a doozy of a score with bouncy jazz riffs for the hep cats of the period. Amy Adams invests Brenda with an innocence Frank has lost and a neediness that equals his own.ĭirector of photography Janusz Kaminski ("Minority Report") and production designer Jeannine Oppewlal ("Pleasantville") give the film a colorfully sunny look which is also reflected in Mary Zophres hip costume design. Nathalie Baye makes Frank's mother a woman looking for the next party, an unsentimental opportunist the opposite of the man she first married. Christopher Walken maintains an air of eternal hope, even when his American dream has crashed and burned. He gives Carl a flat drawl and ramrod posture. ![]() Hanks is great as the Joe Friday whose passion for paper makes his coworkers roll their eyes. He also slips on various accents to suit his various personas. He downshifts from suave ladies' man to needy child looking for acceptance smoothly and can make wistful avoid overt sentimentality. The filmmakers also inject a little of the 1940s Woo Woo Kid into Frank Jr., who proclaims 'this is the best date I ever had!' after bedding a willing stewardess.ĭiCaprio is perfectly cast as the boy who could pass for a professional. He's an obvious father figure, who in real life did help Abagnale learn to make his living on the right side of the law. Once Hanratty learns the genius 'paperhanger' he's after is only a kid, his admiration and determination are joined by a desire to protect and rehabilitate the damaged youth. Spielberg and Nathanson balance Frank's exploits with his need for a father figure and family. Just as Frank is about to get a family back, having healed Brenda's rift with her folks, Hanratty catches up with him and he flees again before a final showdown. Hot on his trail is Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), a humorless FBI agent with a love of bureaucracy which makes him the perfect paper trail hunter.įrank uses his dad's charming ploys to get his way with the ladies until a move to Atlanta and a new job as an ER supervisor crosses his path with Brenda (newcomer Amy Adams), a naive candy striper estranged from her parents who Frank feels compelled to protect. He poses as an eager high school journalist to get inside info from PanAm, scams a uniform and begins flying from city to city cashing forged Pan Am paychecks. When he's forced to choose which parent to live with, he runs from New Rochelle to New York City and begins passing bad checks using the account his dad opened for his birthday. ![]() Frank's genius for the con has already been displayed when he protects himself from school bullies by pretending to be a substitute French teacher for a week. We then flash back to Frank's early years of family drama.įrank is the proudest person in the room when his dad is honored at a rotary meeting by its president Jack Barnes (James Brolin), but dismayed when he finds Jack at home with his mother when he returns home from school one day. ![]() successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer and passed fake checks totaling millions all before his 21st birthday. #Breezy flick seriesScreenwriter Jeff Nathanson ("Rush Hour 2") does, however, find the perfect way to begin the movie, using the TV series 'To Tell the Truth' to present us with the facts that Abagnale Jr. "Catch Me If You Can" is a well-acted, stylish production that can only be faulted for the director's familiar inability to find a concise way to end his film. While Spielberg once again visits his recurring theme of the lost child, he's gradually shedding his propensity for manipulative button pushing. Director Steven Spielberg shifts from the paranoid future of "Minority Report" to the trusting innocence of the early 1960s with "Catch Me If You Can," a comic cat and mouse story that would be hard to believe if it weren't true. ![]()
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