Catch Me If You Can

I saw Steven Spielberg's new movie, Catch Me If You Can, last night. Today, I went back and watched it again. I never do that. It's a fantastic film, I urge you to see it, and I urge you to take it seriously. Yes, it's a light comedy. But it's also a master class in filmmaking, and I sincerely hope that Spielberg will be the first director since Billy Wilder to force Hollywood to give comic films the critical attention they deserve. 2002 was not a great year for films, I'm afraid, and Catch Me If You Can stands out as one of the very few which is both popular and first-rate.

It's superlative from the opening sequence on. The titles, by, I think, Kuntzel and Degas, are magisterial: this is one of the best title sequences in years. They do a fantastic job of evoking the 1960s and encapsulating the whole story of the film to come, all to the accompaniment of a self-contained piece of music by John Williams. They're much more than an homage to Saul Bass: they're a genuine overture. (Note the absence of a pre-credit sequence: these titles alone are enough to grab your attention.)

Since I've mentioned John Williams already, I might as well say right now that he's done an amazing job on the score of this movie. It's light but strong, catchy yet unobtrusive, and, as the final credits roll, Williams even starts tipping the hat to Aaron Copeland. It's a great piece of American composing – and it really pains me to say this, as I make it a point of hating John Williams and all his works, which are usually derivative and overblown.

Catch Me If You Can also has finally managed to break the First Law of Tom Hanks: that he's never appeared in a really good movie. He's not great in this – he just about does what's asked of him, that's it – but finally I've found a Tom Hanks film I can actually really like.

That said, Hanks is acted off the screen by an excellent cast. Leonardo DiCaprio leads with a performance of wit and subtlety, ably supported by Christopher Walken (who's just Christopher Walken, really, I'm not sure where all the superlatives for his performance came from, unless it's simply shock that he should ever play a character with all-too-visible weaknesses) and some wonderful cameos. The two which really stick in the memory are Jennifer Garner as an opportunistic model-turned-hooker and, most wonderfully, Martin Sheen as a southern lawyer with seemingly twice as many teeth as the average man, and impeccable comic timing.

The lion's share of the credit, however, must surely go to Spielberg. It is he who has really pulled off the directorial juggling tricks required: keeping the action moving while developing the characters, wowing us with the production design while at the same time spinning a gripping yarn. Most of all, he manages to keep DiCaprio's character both sophisticated con-man and naive boy at the same time: someone who, when he phones the FBI to taunt them, does so with a glass of milk by his side.

DiCaprio plays Frank Abagnale Jr, whom we first see suffering in a hideous French lock-up, but who not much later is back to the final glory day of his youth, watching his father (Walken) collect some meaningless gong from the New Rochelle Rotarians. As Frank Sr goes up to recieve his award, his son manages to pull the label, whole, from one of the bottles on the table in front of him, and allows himself the briefest of self-congratulatory smiles. The moment is caught en passant by Spielberg's camera – the father is the center of the action – but in that smile, in Frank's pleasure at pulling something off, the next three years of his life are presaged.

Labels torn from bottles become something of a recurring motif for the rest of the film: it's as though Frank is obsessed with possessing them, being able to switch from brand to brand whenever he likes. His wallet contains nothing but labels, his life is little but a successful exercise in making people miss the boy for the label with which he presents himself (pilot, physician, lawyer). As we're told twice in the film, once by Frank Sr and once by Frank Jr, the Yankees keep on winning the World Series not because of Mickey Mantle, but because their opponents can't take their eyes off the pinstripes.

When Frank Sr falls on hard times, his son gets sent to public school, and quickly demonstrates his quick wit, sharp eye for detail, and general ballsiness. After being bullied before even getting to his first class, he quickly takes over French lessons, deciding that being a subsitute teacher has got to be a better life than being a bullied kid. The scene where the headmaster sorrowfully explains to Frank's parents that their son has just called a parent-teacher meeting to plan a school outing to the local baguette factory is a masterpiece of comic filmmaking: for all the solemnity on screen, everybody in the cinema is in stitches. But the real genius is the way in which Spielberg cuts back and forth from the headmaster's office to DiCaprio, outside it, advising one of the girls at school that she should really fold that note from her mother if she doesn't want to be found out as a fraud. In the very next scene, he espies a pin on a couch which shouldn't be there: Spielberg is showing us Frank's acuity in the most unobtrusive way, weaving it in to the rest of the plot.

When his parents divorce, Frank runs away from home, and has something of a Damascene conversion on the street outside a hotel when he's been turned away from yet another bank where he's tried to kite a bad cheque. A shaft of sunlight suddenly illuminates the side of his face, and in a glow of pure slow-motion 1960s joyousness, a pilot leads his gaggle of giggling stewardesses through adulatory throngs and on to the reception desk. It's not long before the very same bank manager who turned Frank away just a scene earlier is eagerly shaking his hand, awed by his purloined pilot's uniform.

This is a movie full of uniforms, not only of pilots but of nurses and stewardesses too, and even of FBI g-men. The latter, true to type, wear black suits, white shirts, black ties, and black hats. The production design is a dream: the 60s in all their glory, with no sign of the counterculture or even of rock 'n' roll. Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal in New York has a starring role, along with countless co-eds in tight sweaters. It's all very 50s-innocent, for all that our hero is jetting around the world cashing millions of dollars in bad cheques.

Even the FBI is not spared the rose-tinted spectacles: for comic relief, most of its employees are bungling idiots, and even Tom Hanks, the agent who finally catches his man, has to endure more than his fair share of flashing-his-ID-backwards and seeing his shirts stained pink in the launderette by a misplaced red top.

All the same, however, Spielberg does manage to imbue Hanks with a certain amount of fatherly gravitas: when Frank Jr loses Frank Sr, he also gains a new father-figure in the shape of the cop who caught him and who is going to spend the next four years trying to get him out of the jail he put him in to. Both Hanks and Walken are divorced men who still wear their wedding rings: the symmetry is almost too pat, but it's done artfully enough that it barely registers consciously the first time around.

There are some lovely Spielberg touches in this film, not least the scene where the FBI raids Frank's Atlanta apartment. A gun, looking like nothing so much as a sea-horse, enters the screen from the left, silhouetted against the swimming pool in the background. Another follows it, and then a third cuts across from the right: it's a truly beautiful shot. There's another when DiCaprio is caught red-handed printing blank cheques, and he stands in his wifebeater with the evidence of his crime fluttering down all around him, even landing on top of his head. And Spielberg can swing from comedy to pathos in an eyeblink, too: when Frank is running away from the FBI for the last time, he has to leave his fiancée, who still considers him to be a doctor and a lawyer. When he comes clean to her, her first reaction – "you're not a Lutheran?" – draws a laugh; her second ("why would you lie to me?") draws sympathy.

Spielberg is also lucky (or clever) enough to have the services of Janusz Kaminski as cinematographer, who turns the film into a sunny delight without ever making it sickly or camp á la Far From Heaven.

Friedrich, over at 2Blowhards, says that Catch Me If You Can could be Spielberg's best-ever film. It's up against some very stiff competition, but I'm inclined to agree. It's certainly better than his other film this year, Minority Report, and is also better than the last film for which he won an Oscar, Saving Private Ryan. I hope that this film gets a nomination too: not only because it's so good, but also because comedies in general, and light comedies in particular, deserve better treatment from the drama-obsessed Academy. There could be no better way to remember Billy Wilder.

Posted by Felix at 23:50 EST