Ray Pride

Two Leos this Christmas: One's bad, one's having the time of his life.

In Steven Spielberg's giddy, cross-country run-and-gun 1960s con caper, "Catch Me If You Can," Leonardo DiCaprio, playing real-life crook Frank Abagnale, Jr., seems as energized as everyone in front of and behind the camera. Made in two short months at more than 120 locations for a production cost, according to Spielberg, of $30 million plus another twenty-five or so for salaries, it's the veteran director's most purely pop picture since "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

"Inspired" by Stan Redding's 1980 as-told-to confession, "Catch Me If You Can" is a terrific picaresque, offering us the vicarious thrill of accompanying someone who, between the ages of 16 and 21, managed to impersonate a Pan Am pilot, ER doctor, prosecuting attorney and college professor, among others. In five years, the clear-sighted paperhanger kited more than $2.5 million in cold checks; he was wanted in all fifty states and twenty-six foreign countries before his arrest and five-year imprisonment. Abagnale's misadventure began when the 16-year-old ran away from home after the 1964 divorce of his parents. The divorce, says the now 54-year-old Abagnale, was "nothing more than the reason I walked away from home. It's not the reason I broke the law. I have no one to blame for breaking the law but myself." Tom Hanks plays FBI agent Carl Hanratty, glorying in drabness, a composite of the many feds who were on Abagnale's trail. While their cat-and-mouse games aren't complex, it's all done with speedy delight.

With a D-for-Detroit baseball cap jammed down on his ears, hooding his eyes, pushing your eyes toward his wispy goatee, the 28-year-old DiCaprio expresses more fascination with Abagnale's charm than the cons themselves. "What I really wanted to know was how he operated, how he had that magnetism. He has a way of making you feel at ease that's really instinctual. He seems as innocent as a schoolteacher, almost."

If Abagnale, however, tells you he's ashamed, terribly ashamed, horrified by his crimes of three decades ago, he'll tell you why, he'll tell you how, and he'll tell you why he's the success he is today: "You have to understand that technology breeds crime."

But was it fun? "What I did was immoral, unethical, illegal and criminal. I cannot make excuses for it." Really? "I was a 16 year-old kid dating 25 year-old women, so obviously there was some joy to all of that." Today, the convicted thief and Brioni-clad entrepreneur may be the leading expert in fraud prevention, traveling the world--"I have over four million frequent flyer miles on American Airlines"--to add anti-counterfeiting devices to checks, currencies, passports and other documents.

Of Spielberg's take--a man who also was a child of divorce and notoriously spent a summer sneaking onto the Universal Pictures lot when he was a teen--DiCaprio says, "I have the ultimate respect for him. He loves what he does, and he's never cynical. He brought out the innocence of Abagnale."

"In my meetings with him and my phone conversations," DiCaprio says of the eternal charmer Abagnale, "I found out what a great actor he really is. He was one of the greatest actors around, but his stage was the world. He was a true thespian, yeah. He was able to embody these different personas effortlessly. It wasn't just putting on these different costumes. It was the fact that he was able to make people believe that they should trust him, and that is something that is instinctual and it isn't something that he can even explain. He doesn't go into great detail about it in the book. It tells about his glorious cons, but when I met him I learned that he put on different accents. He would go on the phone and use a Southern drawl because he felt that was a voice of authority at the time. So, it was basically like playing another actor, which is what made me feel compelled to play the role."

DiCaprio meticulously studied Abagnale's every move, taping conversations and taking notes. "I really wanted to get to the underlying mechanics of what made this guy so engaging and what made people in his surrounding environments immediately trust him. When I got Jeff Nathanson's script, I think it captured the time, this feeling during the 1960s when there was a different code of ethics. I didn't live then, but it seems if you looked someone in the eye and shook their hand, people predominantly believed you. We live in a more cynical time now."

Can he compare it to "Gangs of New York"? Scorsese's picture "is like about a certain time in history, but this is different, it's a character study. It's another coming-of-age-story. I don't know what people are going to draw from this. I just know it's one of the most amazing stories I've ever read." But, he adds, "The more I talk about these movies, the more I see the similarities. They're both revenge movies, they're coming-of-age stories and there's a young man who finds a father figure in his archenemy."

"Catch Me If You Can" is now playing.

(2002-12-26)

Also by Ray Pride

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While Wayne Wang doesn't do for Lopez what Steven Soderbergh did in "Out of Sight," the often-indie Hong Kong-born veteran still brings an unlikely combination of romance and working-class verisimilitude to what could have been just another "Pretty Woman" wannabe.
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Tip of the Week
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DVD Tip of the Week
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My Big Fat Night
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Perfectly mediocre
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Tip of the Week
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Imitation of Life
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