Catch Me If You Can

A ride as bouncy as a cheque

There's a good little film in here, fighting to get out. Hang on, that's not quite right – there's a good little film here that has already got out: it's the animated title sequence which opens Catch Me If You Can. Olivier Kuntzel and Florence Deygas' slick pastiche of the Pink Panther title sequences is an irresistible, miniature caper; accompanying it, the veteran movie composer John Williams pitches in with his most memorable theme for years, worthy of Henry Mancini. If a three-minute cartoon can do all this, perhaps it can perform a miracle and get Hollywood's self-appointed Boy Scout, Steven Spielberg, to swing his pants, if only a little.

After the divorce of his parents in the late Sixties, teenage Frank Jr (Leonardo DiCaprio) runs away from his broken home, becoming a "paper hanger" (cheque forger) to fund himself. He gets by, but it's only when he hits on the idea of kiting the cheques in the uniform of a Pan Am pilot that the money starts to roll in – after all, who's going to bother checking out the credentials of such a dashing young airman? It's a couple of million dollars before FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) picks up Frank's trail – by which time he's masquerading as an ER surgeon, busy getting married and eyeing up a "career" in the law.

This account is based on the infamous three-year spree of Frank Abagnale Jr. The film-makers declined to consult Abagnale during the production, and have been at pains to point out that this is no conventional biopic. Abagnale, now a successful businessman, was concerned that the film treatment didn't rehash his real-life misadventures as an out-and-out romp. It's a reasonable concern; but Abagnale clearly hasn't paid much attention to the last three films in which Spielberg portrayed loosely historical events: Schindler's List, Amistad and Saving Private Ryan. Either that, or Frank Jr has a pretty black sense of humour. We can count ourselves lucky, then, that Catch Me If You Can is as determinedly frothy as it is.

To begin with, not too many demands seem to have been placed on Leonardo DiCaprio, who alternates between little boy lost and young rogue without much in-between. There's some logic in this, admittedly: what better bet to hedge against his participation in the riskier Gangs of New York than to accept straightforward work from the safest pair of commercial hands around, Steven Spielberg. And, indeed, Catch Me If You Can undoubtedly offers DiCaprio some career-saving occupational therapy after his mauling opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Martin Scorsese's flawed epic. Let's just say it's nice to see DiCaprio up and about, walking and talking, let alone acting.

As for Spielberg, he seems only marginally more engaged than his star. Sure, he rattles enjoyably through the mechanics of Frank's cons – the teenager soaks the Pan Am insignia off model airliners to stick to his paycheques and, later, watches courtroom dramas on TV to hone his adversarial technique. But Spielberg never quite seems able to abandon himself to the mischief of the crime caper. And this reticence pervades the film: it's in Janusz Kaminski's sluggish, woozy photography and the funereal pacing (since 1991's Hook, he seems hard pushed to bring in a film under two and a half hours, and Catch Me is only 10 minutes shorter than that). Could it be that Spielberg's hesitation belies, dare I say it, inexperience? A cat-and-mouse comedy drama is a new addition to the Spielberg CV.

What is beyond argument is that Spielberg is letting his old-fashioned, increasingly prim obsession with the notion of the broken home get the better of him. ET represented the most affecting expression of this; by the time of AI, nearly 20 years later, this concern had curdled into something much weirder (that talking teddy bear...).

Thankfully, there's nothing quite that clammy in Catch Me. Yet the film returns again and again to Frank's horror at the divorce of his parents, and his increasing identification with the G-Man Carl Hanratty as a father figure. In this underwritten, almost schematic role, Hanks is a little obvious. At least someone had the imagination to cast Christopher Walken as Frank's tax-evading business-man father. (Frank, at one point, is distraught to learn from his down-at-heel father, now a postman, that there is no chance of a reconciliation between his parents – it's a disturbing scene, not least because you never thought you'd see the day when Christopher Walken played a middle-aged postal worker.)

For the most part, though, Spielberg's prolonged tutting over Frank's family life costs the film dear. What's left of the screenplay envisions the young con artist's progress as a glamorous rise and fall – with plenty of rise and not much fall. One minute Frank is hobnobbing at his own wedding reception, the next, apparently close to death, he's being extricated from a grubby French jail to face justice in the US. We see virtually nothing of Frank's European escapade; instead, on the other side of the Atlantic, Hanks is seen pointing at a map of France, scratching his head... and that's it. It's as if Spielberg senses his Frank Abagnale Jr growing into an altogether more troubling conman, a Tom Ripley figure, and retreats from the prospect.

Fair enough, this is supposed to be light drama – the trouble is, the film then asks us to sit through a stern coda in which Frank, under Carl's paternal eye, is released from jail in the mid-Seventies and inducted into, of all the happy families, the FBI.

By now Kuntzel and Deygas's sharp, cool title credits are a distant memory. They promised a great deal and if you feel short-changed, you've every right to: the opening three minutes write a cheque that the next 217 just can't cash.