Reeling Backward: Catch Me If You Can (2002)

A minor-key gem in the repertoires of Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks, this comic caper has surprising notes of dysfunction and regret.

Programming note: I’ll be talking about this movie on an upcoming “Medium Cool” podcast with Austin Glidden and friends, so make sure to tune in!

Like a lot of people, I watched Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” when it came out 22 years ago (!), enjoyed it as a comedic caper starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a real-life teenage con man and Tom Hanks as the FBI gumshoe chasing him — and then more or less promptly forgot about it.

As with all Spielberg productions it’s well-made with always-top-notch aesthetics, right down to the spot-on period costumes and cars to the loose, jazzy score by John Williams. The mood is set with the opening credits featuring angular cartoon figures representing the chaser and chasee, a mid-’60s vibe that feels like a mix of the Pink Panther and Spy vs. Spy.

I had not seen it or, truthfully, thought about it much since it came out. It got respectful Oscar nods for Williams’ music and for Christopher Walken as DiCaprio’s dad, made solid box office bank and was filed in my subconscious as a minor-key work for Spielberg and his two principle actors — the sort of movie that gets mentioned toward the bottom of a Hollywood icon’s obituary, if at all.

Watching it again in preparation for an upcoming podcast appearance, I was struck how moody and downbeat the film is compared to my previous impressions. It’s really in a lot of ways a tragedy, a tale of two incredibly lonely men who are joined only by their mutual quest to chase one another around the globe. A recurring theme is them speaking on the phone each Christmas Eve because, as Hank’s FBI man Carl Hanratty notes, they don’t have anyone else to talk to.

Regret, rather than avarice, is the film’s drumbeat theme.

Let’s get this out of the way: the real Frank William Abagnale Jr. has grown quite rich and well-known for his tales of a young life impersonating an airline pilot, a doctor and even an assistant prosecuting attorney, all while cashing out millions worth of fake checks, which eventually led him to prison and then reformation as a guy who helped track down thieves like himself.

It’s a nice, pat story of redemption — too pat, as it turns out.

Subsequent inquiries by journalists have shown Abagnale’s colorful stories of his youthful life of crime, captured in a 1980 book that Jeff Nathanson adapted into this screenplay, to be largely unproven or straight-up BS.

It turns out that Abagnale really is a world-class con man, but his true crime was passing himself off as a notorious scallywag. He’s a double-fake pretender, or something.

The cinematic Frank’s dysfunction is rooted in his absolute devotion to his father, Frank Sr. (Walken). As the story opens, his dad is being hounded by the IRS for tax evasion related to his stationery shop. Soon his beloved wife, Paula (Nathalie Baye), leaves him over their financial troubles.

Frank Sr. wooed and won her during World War II, telling and retelling the story of how 200 American G.I.s slobbered over this French girl when she danced for them at the armistice celebration, but it was he who brought her home to the States. It became the foundational piece of his self-mythology, and when she walks out on him, he just crumbles.

It’s a rare performance by Walken with no ironic wink to it, even bordering on maudlin — but it works.

For the son, he is presented with the demand that, at just turned 16, he choose which parent he will live with, and he experiences his own breakdown. He literally runs out the door, starts living in crummy hotels on bad checks, and than quickly learns how to make them good enough to pass.

Though the movie never overtly touches on it — I wish it had — Frank Jr. no doubt learned much of his craft from his dad, understanding things like paper weight, bonding, color separation, proper perforation, and other tricks of the “paperhanger” trade. I wonder if it was bad checks that first got Frank Sr. into trouble with the feds.

The kid initially gains notoriety for passing himself off as a Pan Am copilot, for the simple reason that in 1964 such figures were seen as rare and glamorous, and thus easier vehicles for writing fake checks. Frank never actually flies a plane, just “deadheading” — aka getting a courtesy ride in the cockpit — while zooming around the country to live the high life.

He is nearly caught early on by Hanratty, who busts in on him in his hotel room with all his check-printing apparatus spread out around him. But Frank coolly pretends to be a Secret Service agent who has been hunting for the same guy, even handing over his wallet as collateral for his good intentions. Being humiliated stokes Hanratty’s fire, and their years-long chase is on.

When his reputation as a “skywayman” finally starts to catch up with him, Frank switches to pretending to be a late-shift ER doctor in Atlanta — mostly because he falls for Brenda, an impossibly awkward and adorable nurse played by Amy Adams in her breakout role. Around this time he has started to grasp that he can’t prop up this house of cards forever, and looks to her as his off-ramp to a legit life.

Her father (Martin Sheen) is the district attorney in New Orleans, and Frank convinces him that he was already a lawyer before he became a physician. He manages to pass the Louisiana bar exam, which becomes another element in his cat-and-mouse game with Hanratty, who cannot believe he possibly did so without cheating.

One aspect I think is still the film’s biggest failing is not digging deeper into Hanratty’s backstory. Through his give-and-take with Frank by phone, we get the impression he is divorced with a young daughter he barely sees, and his all-consuming dedication to his job has cost him both a family life and the appreciation of his fellow G-men.

Having a firmer grasp of Hanratty’s personal tragedy would burnish the unspoken empathy between the two men, even as they taunt and vie with each other.

Frank has occasional surprise drop-ins on his father, mostly to impress his dad but also let him know that the government can’t keep the Abagnales down. He states explicitly that he sees his dad’s tax troubles and his own miscreancy as inextricably linked, one balancing out the other.

In their last meeting, Frank Sr. has closed his shop and become a mailman, which the son finds incredibly mortifying for them both. Frank Sr. is too sharp to have been fooled by Junior’s tall tales — how many 16-year-olds are airline pilots who buy their father a Cadillac? — but lacks his son’s panache and sheer audacity to attempt such things himself.

He cheers on his son’s global antics and lives vicariously through them, even when Frank Jr. pledges to stop running if his old man would just ask him to.

“The rest of us really are suckers,” the father whispers in his son’s ear, as much a plea as warning.

Jennifer Garner and Elizabeth Banks both have bit parts as women Frank encounters and woos, using them for his continuing education in confidence games. Garner is a model-turned-prostitute who lures him into paying a thousand bucks for a night with her — that’s $10K in today’s dollars, folks — but winds up forking over her own cash to balance out one of his fake checks.

Banks plays a bank teller (I’m sure some casting director was amused) who educates Frank on MICR numbers on checks, knowledge he exploits to send his phony checks zinging all over the country, lending time to paper-hang a whole region before they bounce.

In the end, Hanratty gets his man, of course. Though he essentially rescues Frank from a medieval French jail and has him extradited back to the states, their bond having grown that deep. He eventually gets the idea of having the kid, still in his early 20s after a few years in jail, work for him in the FBI’s bank fraud division owing to his ability to spot fake checks instantly from a mile off.

Frank is tempted to run again, and Hanratty knows this — essentially even opening the proverbial jetway door for him to hop on a plane and start all over again. The FBI man understands that Frank needed to run as much as he needed to tail him. “Frank, look behind you — nobody’s chasing you.”

I still think “Catch Me If You Can” is a merely good film. But a second, long-delayed viewing — perhaps accompanied by the weight of age — reveals more somber and serious notes than I previously detected. It is indeed a caper, but it’s what these two men are seeking to replace in their own lives, rather than what they chase, that truly fuels them.