‘Tis the season to be with family and relish the time you have left together on this ever-dwindling planet unless you’re Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), in which case you’ll keep spending Christmastime alone. In 2002, whenCatch Me If You Canwas released, nobody in their right mind would have considered it a Christmas film, with how much the marketing pumped up all the scenes of Frank absconding with flight attendants in the baking sunlight. If you see the actual film, though, you realize how oftenthe specter of Christmas and what it’s supposed to represent hovers over Frank’s life like a mockingcloud. No matter how far he chases his faux aspirations, it will still be Christmas next year, and he will still have no one to share in those aspirations with.
Catch Me If You Can
Barely 17 yet, Frank is a skilled forger who has passed as a doctor, lawyer and pilot. FBI agent Carl becomes obsessed with tracking down the con man, who only revels in the pursuit.
What isCatch Me If You CanAbout?
Catch Me If You Canisa mostly fabricated storyof Frank Abagnale, Jr., and howhe led a life of forgery and deception. By using his knowledge of faking checks and proper credentials, he went on to pretend to be an airline pilot, a medical doctor, and a lawyer, all the while being pursued by FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks). The film is somewhat episodic in its structure, devoting huge chunks of the plot to each of these endeavors, interweaving them with Hanratty’s often goofy efforts to catch him. Along the way, Abagnale, Jr. has encounters that let this man-child live out all his wildest dreams, all allegedly in the name of making his father Frank, Sr. (Christopher Walken) proud and bringing back the luster to the Abagnale family name.
This is a film directed bySteven Spielberg, a filmmaker who has spent a lifetimeinjecting complicated daddy issuesinto all of his films, even going so far as toprocess his feelings for his fathernot too long ago. That father-son connection is arguably the most important theme of the whole film. Frank, Jr. idolizes Frank, Sr., although his father was a known con artist who got caught by the IRS for tax problems, which ruined his reputation and forced the family to uproot and change their lifestyles. Frank, Jr. learned his philosophy of life and his commitment to hustling those around him from his father. This makes it all the more ironic and devastating when Frank, Sr. effectively disavows Frank, Jr.’s lifestyle, not approving of his son’s need to regain the prestige they once had and Sr. has finally accepted not having. It’s a microcosm of the tragedy of Frank, Jr.’s life:his drive to connive his way toward a more fulfilling life for himself and his family left him more isolatedand without a support system than ever before. It reaches a point where the only person he has to talk to, who truly understands him, is Carl, the man who’s hell-bent on capturing him.
Christmas Antagonizes How Alone Frank Is
Frank spends numerous years of his young adult life on the run from the authorities, jumping from one fake identity to another, and thatnecessitates a curbing of the relationships he has with other people. Besides a delectably sexy one-night stand with a high society mystery woman (Jennifer Garner) and an increasingly bizarre marriage with a nurse who works under his jurisdiction (Amy Adams), Frank can’t get too close to anyone, so he can maintain his sense of mystery and no one can background check who he is. The film helps alleviate the potential boredom of this character constantly being alone on his journey by having him develop a telephone rapport with Carl, where the two call each other and engage in a small series of cat-and-mouse conversations not too dissimilar from theHannibal Lecter-Clarice Starling dynamic, with Frank relishing the chase in a way that would makethe Zodiac killer smile.While Frank tells himself that he’s a criminal mastermind three steps ahead of everyone else, Carl proves himself to be more perceptive than his affable demeanor gives off and isperhaps the father figure that Frank needed all along.
The most notable of these interactions is a scene where Frank calls Carl around Christmastime. Frank is alone in a dark hotel room, sitting by a window with the shades drawn; Carl is the only person left in the FBI’s office, at a desk in the center of the room. The two are visually linked by how they’re both lit using environmental lighting, with Frank bathed in the outside light coming through the shades and Carl having his desk lamp and a nearby Christmas tree,seeing each other as the one bright spot in otherwise miserable lives. Being the older, wiser gentleman, Carl accepts this, while Frank is deluded into thinking he’s happy, and calling Carl out of a noble want to apologize for causing trouble in his life. Carl sees through this facade, and dunks on Frank by cutting to the truth:he called Carl because he has “no one else to call,” and Frank hangs up out of wounded pride.This scene by itself is already effective, but the inclusion of the Christmas tree in Carl’s room proposes the idea that Frank is still a child feeling the pangs of being alone without a loved one to spend time with, so he compromises by reaching out to the one authority figure who he thinks can understand him.
‘Catch Me If You Can’ Review: DiCaprio and Hanks Shine in This Spielberg Hidden Gem
“People only know what you tell them.”
Frank Gets Caught at Christmas Multiple Times
The idea that Frank and Carl always find each other around Christmasis one that Frank, himself, is gradually all too aware of. He makes it explicitly known towards the climax. Carl eventually catches up with Frank in person and corners him in a printing factory, where Frank is running on fumes and printing out mountains of fake checks for his future forgery. The fake checks are spit up into the air, flurrying around Frank and Carl, paper snowflakes blessing the setting with Christmas vibes. We know for sure this scene is taking place near or on Christmas because when Frank first sees Carl, he immediately shouts out “Merry Christmas!” Not only that, but he even calls out the fact that “every Christmas, I’m talking to you!“Frank is in his sugar glass snowglobe, with Carl there to routinely shake it up and bring him back to reality.
While Carl may have caught him, it didn’t last long. Two years go by, Carl tells him that Frank, Sr. has died, and Frank escapes from the FBI yet again, this time making it to his mother’s house. He arrives just in time to witness his mother celebrating Christmas with the man she’s moved on to since she had left Frank, Sr. years prior. Frank looks in at the family through the window, his face framed and fogged over with frost,with Nat King Cole’s “The Christmas Song” playing in what must be karma sneering at him. He ran across the country from the authorities in a pathetic attempt to see his mother, and she didn’t notice he was even out there. He’s almost grateful to be led back to custody by Carl, as he couldn’t bear to see her enjoying her life apart from him and his father.
The Film Serves as a Critique of the American Family
Frank Abagnale, Jr. set out to defraud as many people as he could,all for the sake of a father who wished he had learned a different lesson. He could have pursued this goal honorably and gotten a non-criminal job, as he was clearly intelligent and exceptionally skilled in several areas. Sadly, he only knew how to fake and lie because that’s what his father taught him. In a sense, he went on a journey to preserve the sanctity ofthe American Dream of family as a unit of comfort, security, and class.The irony is that he did so by going down a corrupt paththat scammed many people out of money, abused the trust of patrons looking for services he claimed he could provide, and married a poor inexperienced young woman in the hopes of creating a family dynamic for himself.
Furthermore, the deeper he got into his fraudulent ways, the more alienated he was from the people he was hoping to support, and had to continuously turn to another well-meaning father figure he preferred to tease and antagonize.Coinciding the absolute low points of Frank’s life with Christmas served to underline how far Frank had driven himself away from what his purported values were. If Christmas is simultaneously the most earnest way of expressing your connection to your loved ones and also a holiday fueled by capitalism and living up to the image of being a prosperous citizen, what’s more fitting than that?
Catch Me If You Canis currently streaming on Netflix in the U.S.
Watch on Netflix
