DiCaprio upstages Hanks in this true story about a fake

On the basis of "The Beach" or even last week's "Gangs of New York," it would be easy to count Leonardo DiCaprio out and consider his star-making performance in "Titanic" as some kind of fluke. He was not very memorable in either role.

MOVIE REVIEW

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken

RUNNING TIME: 140 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for some sexual content and brief language

WHERE: Majestic Bay, Varsity

GRADE: B

But he wonderfully exonerates himself in Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me If You Can." As the real-life con man and obsessive check forger Frank Abagnale Jr., he's believable, compelling and charismatic. He even manages the feat of knocking Tom Hanks right off the screen.

Based on Abagnale's 1980 memoir, the movie tells the story of the man's career in crime, inspired by what seems a certain genetic predisposition for the art of bunko and a subconscious drive to restore the lost fortunes of his beloved businessman father (Christopher Walken).

Beginning in 1963, when he's a mere 16 years old, Abagnale cons himself a Pan Am pilot's uniform, fakes an identity card and spends much of the '60s dead-heading around the country on Pan Am flights while cashing millions of dollars worth of forged Pan Am paychecks.


Frank Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio) passes himself off as a Pan Am pilot, shown here surrounded by flight attendants, in "Catch Me If You Can."

When this con finally gets too hot for him, the high-school dropout masquerades as a doctor and gets an administrative job in a major hospital and then tells the world he's an attorney and even passes the Louisiana state bar exam.

Meanwhile, he's been living the high life, romancing the ladies and avoiding a determined FBI agent (Hanks), who, after suffering several humiliations at Abagnale's hands over a period of years, has made a single-minded pursuit of the wily, elusive con artist the major commitment of his lonely life.

The story is very close to the 1961 Robert Mulligan movie "The Great Impostor," which starred Tony Curtis as Ferdinand Waldo Demara, a real-life chameleon-crook who successfully posed as -- among many other things -- a surgeon, a naval officer, a Trappist monk and even a prison warden.

And as a study in demented role-playing, "Catch" may not be quite as effective as "Impostor." It's also never quite as gripping an action piece as you might think with Spielberg's name in the credits, and Hanks is largely wasted in a role that any halfway decent character actor could have played as well.

But it's still a delicious character study, made biblically poignant by the script's careful layering of Abagnale's complex relationship with his flawed but loving parents and the detailed performances Spielberg gets out of Nathalie Baye as his French-born mother and (especially) Walken as his hard-luck father.

And DiCaprio could hardly be better. He brings this outrageous character and his demons to life with skill, sympathy and a symphony of small, telling touches. It's delicate and subtle -- not the kind of thing that wins Oscar nominations -- but it's far and away the best thing he's done on film yet.