Catch Me If You Can. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Jeff Nathanson based on the book by Frank W. Abagnale Jr. with Stan Redding. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Nathalie Baye, Martin Sheen, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Garner. A DreamWorks Pictures release (146 minutes). Opens Wednesday at theaters to be announced.

Catch Me If You Can is a story of shifting identities, and not just those of subject Frank W. Abagnale Jr., the real-life impostor who spent much of the 1960s pretending to be an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, forging millions of dollars in checks along the way, all before he turned 21. Star Leonardo DiCaprio has also been a chameleon throughout his career, and that's true this Christmas, since he gives a very different performance in Gangs of New York. As for director Steven Spielberg, well, recall that he made Jurassic Park and Schindler's List in 1993 and The Lost World and Amistad in 1997. This year, he turned his summer genre piece, Minority Report, into the heavy, serious film and saved the frothy, popcorn movie for the holidays. His most astonishing switch, however, is that for the first time in his career he's become a cynic.

Spielberg has never been adept at full-on comedy (Exhibit A: 1941), and though he shows a lot of fizz and relish in depicting Frank's ingenious scams (which are carried off by DiCaprio with brio and charm), you have to sit through some draggy parts to get to them. It's important to Spielberg (and to screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, of Rush Hour fame) to show why Frank became a con man. Blame his parents. Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken, who's about 15 years too old for the role but plays it deliciously) is an admired small-business man. Mom Paula (Nathalie Baye) is a glamorous and sophisticated French woman. Both turn out to be accomplished liars and cheats. When they divorce, young Frank is so torn apart that he runs away, first from his family and ultimately from the law. So his dishonesty is something he comes by honestly.

Like so many Spielberg movies, this one is about a lost child searching for a parent. (As with the robot boy in AI, Frank's love is real, but he is not.) The teen turns to the one dependable figure in his life, Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), the G-man Javert who pursues him across the years.

Carl is a humorless bureaucrat (though Hanks's performance is anything but) who nonetheless has enough intuition and insight to rise above the unimaginative conformity of the Efrem Zimbalist Jr.-era FBI and recognize the artistry of Frank's cons. He's Salieri to Frank's Mozart, the only one in a mediocre institution who appreciates Frank's genius. And Hanks seems to recognize that though he once played Joe Friday's zany young partner in the movie version of Dragnet, he's since aged into a doughy Joe Friday himself.

Frank accomplishes his deceptions via two principles he learns from his dad: people know only what you tell them, and they're cowed by an impressive uniform. The mid '60s are still a universe away from the "Question Authority" buttons of the counterculture and the loss of faith in institutions; it's a period the movie's production and costume designers re-create with glee, depicting the playful futurism of an era that trusted in the benign nature of technology. In other words, it's the prelapsarian version of the world depicted in Minority Report. The lessons are the same: appearances are deceptive, and authority has to earn its respect. But whereas Minority Report imagined the ultimate triumph of humane values, Catch Me If You Can suggests that most of us are marks and suckers who need to be protected from our own credulous naïveté.

That's an unusual message to be coming from Spielberg, whose characters have almost always evinced some shred of human dignity. Not here. Frank drops people, like his trusting fiancée (Amy Adams), as soon as they're no longer useful, and so does Spielberg. What happens to her? Or some of the other victims of his scams? You never find out. Frank lives his life like the TV and movie characters he loves (particularly James Bond), but though it's fun to watch people being bamboozled on screen, it's no fun in real life. Watching Catch Me If You Can, you may feel like one of Frank's victims. You'll be charmed and entertained for a couple hours, but then you'll realize you're out 10 bucks.

Issue Date: December 20 - 26, 2002