Catch Me If You Can Review

Spielberg shot this quickly, right on the heels of Minority Report, and the speed shows in the best way. The film is loose and warm and nearly weightless, with Janusz Kaminski softening the 1960s into pastel airport terminals and hotel corridors, and the animated title sequence by Kuntzel and Deygas sets the terms before anyone speaks. DiCaprio was twenty-seven playing sixteen and gets away with it by playing Frank as a boy performing adulthood badly and being believed anyway, all bluff and fast recovery.

Tom Hanks gives Carl Hanratty a humorless decency that makes the Christmas phone calls land. Christopher Walken, in perhaps six scenes, turns Frank Senior into a man who has run out of angles and cannot say so, never better than at the Rotary dinner where he accepts an honor he knows is hollow. The cons start to repeat once the method is clear, and the French stretch loses tension because the outcome was never in doubt. What stays is small: a father refusing the keys to a car his son bought with stolen money, because taking them would mean admitting how the money was made.