[This is meant to be a sketchy
review, and maybe I’ll add to it if I see the film again soon.]
This film depicts the 1960s with
flavorful soundtrack—“The Look of Love” for a call-girl scene, “The Lady from
Ipanema” for another scene; The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” for a raucous party
scene. Are we back in innocent times? Not quite. Threading his way through 45-year-old
history—pretending to be an airline pilot (in the days in which consumer air
flight had a newly prestigious aura); later pretending to be a doctor in
Georgia; etc.—is a young man, Frank William Abagnale, Jr., whose con artist
skills (in ~1967) seem to make him decades ahead of his time. He pulls off cons
that determine the rest of his life (prison, and later more or less “pressed”
service in designing check security for banks, with him paid millions for the
effort, according to end titles), all by age 19.
Leo DiCaprio as a nimble Frank, with Walken as a sort of loyal father
Leonardo DiCaprio has a
sort of feline way of handling his gait at times, but he depicts the male complexities
of Frank in his character arc from young kid pulling off stunts (~1967) to more
jaded crook in shackles (1969). Even his voice changes. Earnest and youthful
when he’s young, he sounds more like a bit of a punk with a hardened-character
Long Island accent in his 1969 incarnation (along with style-of-the-times long
hair).
Christopher Walken, with
his typical pause-rich style of speaking making him one of the true weirdos
among U.S. male actors who’ve been around 30 or more years, is Frank’s father.
With a Long Island–ish accent and a stab at Italian flavor to some of his
speech, this father seems to try hard to support his family—the one other
member is his French-born wife, whom he met during his service in World War II
(and his being the only American to take her home as a mate is a landmark event
the family seems to make a ritual of noting on occasion). Later in the movie we
find he runs a stationers’ store.
But he seems to run afoul of the
“financial authorities”—he has an ongoing battle with the IRS over back taxes
(actual tax fraud, we hear about), alluded to in the film in a few places. He
gets frustrated enough (and has enough moxie) to want to sue the IRS. Early on,
the family must “downsize” their lifestyle—get rid of the old Caddy, move into
a more affordable home. Eventually the mother and father split (she will
eventually marry an associate of the father’s from a Rotary Club in Long Island
[New Rochelle, to be precise]).
Yet Frank and his father seem
“of a piece” in terms of their talents for not entirely playing by the rules.
When Frank, alienated in a new school, pretends to be a substitute French
teacher for some days, and the parents are called in by the principal to
discuss the prank, the mother is suitably disapproving, but father and son
share an appreciative chuckle.
It would appear that the
parents’ split precipitates Frank’s life of con-artist crime. This is suggested
in the film’s Wikipedia article. In real life, apparently, Frank Abagnale
never saw his parents again after the running away shown at the end of the
first ~25 minutes of the film. But in the film, Frank returns to his aging
father a couple times—as if to try to win approval, especially in his interest
to show he’s trying to “get it all back.” He means their middle-class lifestyle
they’d originally be at or within grasp of.
These might seem small people
(though maybe not by everyone’s standards today), and Frank’s con-game life
might be darkly amusing as true-crime stories can be, especially one depicted
in a sort of light/sometimes-comic way as this one is. But what’s really
interesting is how the G-man after Frank tails Frank doggedly determined
to get his man and, more interestingly, as can happen in such situations, the
G-man and Frank come to bond in the way that can happen between law enforcer
and someone living outside the normal rules of society. The G-man will later be
key to Frank’s rehabilitation.
Frank also, we see, is a
talented man—his attention to detail, so important to a forger, show up early:
noticing the staining of wine on his parents’ carpet getting smeared in; or
finding on the sofa the club pin of a man his mother is apparently having an
affair with.
Tom Hanks in a tour de force performance
Tom Hanks provides a lot
of color to his character, Carl Hanratty (according to the film’s Wikipedia article, there was no FBI agent Carl Hanratty in the real case, but there
was an FBI agent named Sean O’Riley who was after Abagnale). Dressed in humorless,
plain black “Establishment” pants and jacket (rather like a Blues Brother), Carl
is truly a “square” individual, even if he develops a sort of “hip” fondness
for Frank. (By the way, costumes were designed by Mary Zophres, the Coens’
preferred costumer.) Carl is humorless enough that his associates on the
Abagnale case once make note of his humorlessness, to which he responds with a
harsh joke.
But Hanks really plays up the
workaday-stiff quality. You see him stand watching the clock, toward the end of
the movie, when Frank isn’t in to his new job yet. He has that sort of bowed-out-belly,
slightly splayed-feet look that a man gets whose posture is a bit like a
rooster’s, when incidentally he no longer cares how un-sexy he looks. Or check
him out when he is at the wedding party, helmed by the Louisiana lawyer played
by Martin Sheen; in one brief scene, Hanks, Sheen, and the woman playing
Sheen’s character’s wife are standing out in front of the big Victorian house,
and Hanks’ Carl is moving around like a robotic chicken, nerdy/dignified/polite,
each move squared. So even at a party, he is a stiff. He reminds you of the
remark some commentator made a few years ago of Nixon seeming like someone who
wore his wing-tips to the beach.
At other times, Hanks—usually so
serious as Carl—can exhibit passing humor of a somewhat savage kind. When he
and his associates are seated with Frank’s mother in her new household’s living
room, and one associate hesitatingly keeps reaching for a fork and calling off
the move, suddenly Carl intervenes and gets him a fork, then hands it to him as
if he’s going to stab him with it. Hanks has been called an actor like a Gary
Cooper (I guess, meaning with some wide, Everyman appeal), but it seems to me
he can inhabit a character, quirks and all, so deeply that you almost don’t see
how much he’s taken it upon himself to display someone else’s un-Hanks-like panoply
of traits.
Details of the story arc
* DiCaprio’s Abagnale is a
charmer, as I suppose con men so often are—he can get people into cooperating
with him through friendly small talk, compliments (especially to women), and
such little ploys as presenting a necklace he says he found in a parking lot,
and it “must have slipped right off your neck!”—a trick he learned from his
father. This trick doesn’t work equally well on everyone, but it does do well
enough in one case to get him a rather “advanced date,” so to speak, with an
apparently “easy” airline stewardess.
* Jennifer Garner turns up
as a call girl Frank encounters one night in the corridor of a big hotel. The
two young people show they are, sort of, peas in a pod in terms of being
charming operators, and after he has invited her into his room—she is no
dummy—and they are negotiating over what to pay her for a night, Frank ends up
having her accept one of his bogus checks, with some cash back ($400 in change)
out of her bosom-area “wallet.” (This could be said to exemplify something we
can say characterizes an unsettling amount of U.S. business today: you don’t know
who’s screwing whom.) But with her Jennifer Garner–style charm laminating a
probable tough-operator personality, you figure Frank ought to be careful he
doesn’t encounter her again. Her stiletto heels look like they could puncture a
truck tire with one kick. (Ironically, this scene is intercut with glimpses of
Carl Hanratty in one humdrum episode of his own nerdy life: lumping his time
away in a Laundromat, getting his white shirts stained from some red whatsit
that crept into his laundry from the woman using the machine next to his.)
* “You didn’t just call to
apologize. You have no one else to call!” This line from Carl as he has a frank
conversation with Frank (sorry for the pun), with Frank having apologized for
tricking Carl at a Southern motor lodge, shows that an isolation Frank is in,
and the sheer closing-in side of the chase relationship, is leading Carl to
become a new father figure for Frank. This is a very interesting psychological component
of the film. I defer commenting on this more, either as to this film’s specific
handling of it or as to the phenomenon generally. Something of the same thing
is seen in the fact that, in torture contexts, a sort of emotional identification,
paradoxically, forms between the tortured and the torturer. This is a more violence-borne
phenomenon that I would need to prepare even more to discuss. The bonding
between Frank and Carl is one more borne of Frank’s neediness, and is a more
innocuous kind. But in both the criminal and torturer situations, the bonding
happens partly because the relationships are radically outside normal social
norms.
* In a relatively late scene,
Frank is at the Louisiana home of his girlfriend, a rather innocent nurse Brenda
(played by Amy Adams) whom he has met at a Georgia hospital. At one
point, a Sixties-era homey moment pops up like Jiffy Pop when Mitch Miller (do
some of you remember him?) is on the TV, and it’s time to sing along with some
old Irish ditty. Frank tries to play along, maybe sadly envious of such
innocent family fellowship. Martin Sheen, as Brenda’s father, shows how courtly
and fatherly he can be after his (Sheen’s, not the character’s) strenuous
decades-old work in the likes of Apocalypse
Now (1979). Frank has a somewhat similar “epiphany” when some old tune is
on the radio and the nurse’s parents are in the kitchen, swaying enjoyably to
the music. Frank sees the precious family life he has lost when his parents
separated, and which in some desperate, devious way he is trying to recover (or
replace) with his rich series of cons.
