![]() Arguably the best thing about Spielberg is his ability to convey meaningful, often complex ideas through scenes and stories which appear to be totally frivolous. It would be foolish, however, to think that Catch Me If You Can was all about surface, with no deeper ambitions other than recreating the period setting or providing a thrilling chase. The film is fantastically paced so that two-and-a-half hours just fly by, with the thrill of the chase being beautifully balanced by more thoughtful and suspensful moments. He'd expressed an interest in doing so after 1941, with George Lucas pitching the original idea for Raiders of the Lost Ark as "better than James Bond". While it doesn't revolve around the FBI enough to properly constitute a spy thriller, Catch Me If You Can is still the closest that Spielberg has come to making a James Bond film. No skirt seems too short, no car too modern, and no expression out of context or added purely to make the characters seem old-fashioned. Having been a teenager in the early- and mid-1960s, Spielberg clearly has a firm understanding of the fashions, manners and institutions of the period. Janusz Kami?ski, who has worked with Spielberg since Schindler's List, offers up a colour palette of appealing pastel colours, harking us back to a more innocent, carefree time. The good visual work continues after the credits with some lovely period details. used the 1960s look as juxtaposition to its funky CG animation, Catch Me If You Can uses it to great effect to acclimatise us before we've even seen our leads. John Williams' score is playful and upbeat but with a whistful undercurrent, bringing to mind the iconic theme music for the Pink Panther series. The opening credits are quintessentially 1960s, with animated versions of the characters dancing out of the way of the various names. The first big success of Spielberg's film is putting us in the period. ![]() While direct comparisons with Indiana Jones are a little misleading, this is as close as he's come to Indy for some time, at least in terms of entertainment. It has many of the elements which have characterised his best work: light-hearted adventure, a celebration of American values, a son searching for his father and a dry, often joyous sense of humour. Regardless of his reputation or the influence he wields over the industry, the story of Catch Me If You Can is perfect for his sensibility. In the end, Spielberg was the right person to direct this film. well, on the basis of Goya's Ghosts, it would have been rather dull. Both Hallstrom and Crowe would have made things much more sentimental, playing up the father-son relationship at the expense of the actual cons. Verbinski would have handled the story incompetently while doing some justice to the period detail, just as he would later do with Pirates of the Caribbean. Fincher would have brought an edgy undercurrent to proceedings, focussing on the mental state of Abagnale and the ease with which he was able to fool the system. In each case, the director's subsequent output gives us some idea of how they would have approached Abagnale's story. Fincher later jumped ship to make Panic Room, being replaced first with Gore Verbinski, then Lasse Hallstrom, Milo Forman and finally Cameron Crowe before Spielberg himself opted to direct. Having been passed around the studios for 20 years since the book rights were first optioned in 1980, the project began to gain traction in 2000 when David Fincher signed on to direct. While it perhaps doesn't go as far into its subject matter as perhaps it could have done, it's still a sterling piece of entertainment with a lot of heart behind it.Ĭatch Me If You Can has an interesting production history, in which any one change could have drastically altered the finished product. It takes the potentially grim and gritty subject matter of confidence tricksters and spins us a merry yarn about the excesses of youth whose protagonist is always empathetic. This brings us on to Catch Me If You Can, a later Spielberg effort covering the early life of teen fraudster and con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. If Steven Spielberg's film demonstrates that darkness can severely backfire in stories of a light or silly nature, we might logically assume that the opposite is true - namely that a serious (or in this case factual) subject matter can be handled in a fun, light-hearted way while still getting its substance across. ![]() ![]() In my review of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I spoke about the misconception that darker films are inherently better or more substantial. ![]()
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