Other Reviews in this Series: Duel, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1941, Empire of the Sun, Amistad, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, War of the Worlds, Munich, Lincoln
Other Spielberg Reviews: Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Bridge of Spies
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Jeff Nathanson
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Amy Adams, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye
Runtime: 141 mins.
2002
The common conception is that modern Spielberg is lesser than vintage Spielberg. Granted, since 1993 Spielberg has only made two instant classics*. His output of the past two decades has been largely glossed over by the public and left out of critical conversations about Spielberg the Artist. Maybe it's no coincidence that 1993 was around the time that Spielberg made yet another conscious decision to move away from genre fare and towards more grounded socially conscious efforts.
*These classics being Saving Private Ryan and Lincoln.
So we come to Catch Me If You Can, a movie that passed through the hands of many directors and actors before landing with the team most capable of making it. At twenty-seven years old, DiCaprio was the perfect candidate to portray Frank Abagnale, famed real-life scam artist wunderkind. Abagnale was ten years younger than DiCaprio when he went on his check fraud spree, but DiCaprio convincingly portrays a heightened adolescent innocence for the first twenty minutes of the film. DiCaprio then spends the next two hours brilliantly subverting and exploiting that appearance of innocence, which makes this one of the most pivotal roles in Leo's career; before Catch Me he had been stuck in a bit of a Titanic rut and, as Spielberg predicted would happen at the time, Catch Me catapulted Leo into a series of roles that cemented him in the top echelon of Hollywood talent.
