Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen
Director: Steven Spielberg
Rated: PG
IT is amazing how some films, which are in the pipeline for years, come out at just the right time.
With financial corruption and accounting impropriety dogging some of our largest companies, business ethics has taken centre stage.
Catch Me If You Can is based on the biography of Frank Abagnale Jr, who wrote his memoirs with Stan Reddings. Frank Junior (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the only child of Frank Abagnale Sr (Christopher Walken), a small-time businessman with huge ambitions and petty criminal intentions.
Frank Junior grows up in a dysfunctional family that despises the simple and mundane for the next big thing, which is going to make them all rich.
This patrimony leaves its mark.
Not yet out of school Frank Junior is cashing counterfeit cheques, assuming various identities and living the high life. His swindle comes to the attention of Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), the founder of the banking corruption unit within the FBI. Hanratty becomes obsessed by Abagnale.
He is, in turn, impressed by Abagnale’s cunning and intelligence while aware of the social fall-out from his million dollar swindles.
Frank Junior keeps going so he can impress his father. Frank Senior wants his son to keep going to see how far he can go. Hanratty keeps pursuing Frank Junior because he wants to impress his bosses and see if he can catch this financial chameleon.
When one of these three loses their obsession, the story takes a very interesting twist to its end.
Set in the late 1960s, director Steven Spielberg has the resources to re-create the period with meticulous detail.
DiCaprio, Hanks and Walken give solid and enjoyable performances. Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay gives each of these characters depth and nuance. Each in his own way is a pathetic figure.
As good a story as Catch Me If You Can is, Spielberg could have told it in under 140 minutes, and should have done so. The middle section is too drawn out.
This film is an engaging moral tale about the story behind the deceit and corruption we hear all too regularly these days. It reminds us that small compromises have a habit of snowballing into moral avalanches.
It’s hard to imagine Spielberg didn’t see the Freudian themes in this story. On one level it’s a more sophisticated than usual cops and robbers story. On another level it’s a study of the Id and the Super Ego, or the child and the parent within each of us.
Read in this light Abagnale is the completely spontaneous ego wanting his ego, his father, to put limits on his behaviour and so avoid censure from the super ego, Agent Hanratty.
Sounds a bit far-fetched? Go and see Catch Me If You Can and see how far off the mark I am.
