While Frank loves and idealizes his father, the man is a broken, sad figure. You can't steal that much money without someone noticing, and sure enough, someone does: Carl Hanratty, an FBI bank fraud agent played by Tom Hanks.Ĭatch Me If You Can is ultimately about Frank fleeing from one father figure (Walken) for another (Hanks). DiCaprio, an actor who often seems both boyish and mature at the same time, is perfectly cast, able to easily dip in and out of Frank's schemes to pass himself off as older than he really is.Īnd through it all, Frank keeps cashing phony checks and making more and more and more money. The impending separation of his parents, and by extension the obliteration of his idea of what "home" is, sends Frank into a life of crime. "But except for those touchstones for me, there are those strands that got me to say: you know, there's something also about me that I can say through the telling of this kind of lighthearted story." "Some of my films have had to do with broken homes and people on the run from their sad pasts," Spielberg said. His way of making the film extra personal. His way of confronting his parent's traumatizing divorce. With this knowledge in mind, it's safe to assume it was added to the film at Spielberg's behest. This plot point was absent from earlier drafts of the script before Spielberg came aboard. A family friend for whom Frank's mother will soon leave Frank's father. One day, Frank comes home from school and finds another man in the house with his mother – a family friend. But Frank's preconceived notions of his parent's happy marriage soon come crashing down. ( Christopher Walken), and French immigrant Paula ( Nathalie Baye) – are the picture of marital bliss. As far as Frank Abagnale ( Leonardo DiCaprio) is concerned, his parents – smooth-talking Frank Sr. This marital strife gets center stage early on in Catch Me If You Can. "And then the greatest thing that happened to me was when I saw the light, and realized I needed to love him in a way that he could love me back." "I think one of the worst things that happened to me was my voluntary fallout with my father," Spielberg would later say. Even after learning this, however, Spielberg still held his father responsible.Įventually, Spielberg's wife Kate Capshaw urged him to reconcile with his father. She had fallen in love with a family friend, and decided to leave Spielberg's father for this other man. Later, Spielberg learned that the divorce had actually been his mother's idea. The divorce was hard on the future-filmmaker, and he laid the blame of the split solely at the feet of his father. When Spielberg was 19, his parents divorced. Daddy issues were a major part of most Spielberg films, but Catch Me took things a bit further. There is, of course, the theme of a lost boy searching for his father. The filmmaker saw himself in Frank Abagnale, and found ways to stitch his own life experiences onto the character. Perhaps the most personal film Spielberg had made in some time. Instead, he crammed multiple locations, wardrobe changes and set pieces all into a wham-bam 52-day shooting schedule, and ended up delivering one of the most enjoyable films of his career. #The terminal full movie movieThe filmmaker didn't use the lighter movie to take it easy. Yet Catch Me If You Can isn't Spielberg on autopilot. It was perhaps a confirmation that even when Spielberg tried to go light in the 21st century, darkness still found its way in. Yet even here, beneath the brightly lit retro fashions of Catch Me and the slapstick humor of The Terminal, melancholy still lurks. On the surface, these two films were light hearted, brisk affairs. In place of the darkness came a sunny, funny trip back to the 1960s, followed by a stop-over into present day. Gone were the oppressive, often hellish futurescapes of A.I. And what a terrifying thought that is.Ĭatch Me If You Can and The Terminal were Spielberg's pivots out of darkness. If home really is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, then the main characters of Catch Me and Terminal perhaps have no real home at all. Both in the literal sense, and the abstract sense. The main characters in Catch Me If You Can and The Terminal are both in search of home. and Minority Report, Steven Spielberg made two seemingly light, breezy films that could very well be cinematic explorations of that Frost quote. "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," wrote Robert Frost.
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