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Oscar Catch
After a week of having the flu, I'm back with a little column today. Today we bring you Hollyfeld's take on the script to Steven Spielberg's next film, Catch Me If You Can. It's a really great script based on a really good book. More script reviews coming your way next week. Please make sure to join our Oscar Pool group at Yahoo. Follow the details at the bottom of this column. Hopefully Moulin Rouge will win 2 or 3 Oscars Sunday night...
Catch Me If You Can Script Review
"Hollyfeld, here. Frank is a smart kid, who like many people comes from a dysfunctional home. Mom and Dad met in the war, and are too distracted by their upper middle-class lifestyles to fully acknowledge that their marriage isn't working. Mom is having an affair, Dad is perpetually trying to con his way out of potential bankruptcy. They're both too busy with their own lives to really care that young Frank has been impersonating a substitute French teacher at school, and has been holding Parent/Teacher conferences and planning a field trip to a bread factory. But Frank loves his folks, listening attentively to his Dad's lessons ('People only know what you tell them'), and trying hopelessly to get his Mom to quit smoking. He loves them so much, in fact, that when they divorce, he does what any normal kid would do: he runs away... and becomes one of the ten most wanted men in the country.
FRANK
My name is Frank Abagnale Jr, and some people consider me the world's greatest imposter. From 1964 to 1966 I successfully impersonated an airline pilot for Pan Am Airlines, and flew over two million miles for free. During that time I was also the Chief Resident Pediatrician at a Georgia hospital, the assistant Attorney General for the state of Louisiana, and a Professor of American History at a prestigious University in France. By the time I was caught and sentenced to prison, I had cashed over six million dollars in fraudulent checks in 26 foreign countries and all fifty states, and I did it all before my 18th birthday. To this day, I am the only teenager ever to have been placed on the FBI's ten most wanted list. My name is Frank Abagnale Jr.
Read that excerpt from the first scene in Steven Spielberg's next film, Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Christopher Walken and Tom Hanks, and tell me you don't want to see the movie. Still not interested? Let me tell you then that the story is true, and the script is grand.
Frank's (Leonardo DiCaprio) exploits, if you are unfamiliar with the real life events, are extraordinary, but perhaps what is most extraordinary about them is how ordinary they are. No grand schemes, no complex plans... Frank gets an idea, studies, buys some equipment, and then gets away with economic murder on almost every page of the script. It's his humanity as a con man that gets you. He isn't above us all, and everything he does seems like something we should have thought of ourselves. When he thinks he's caught with his pants down, he just recycles dialogue from TV shows, for God's sake. This is a con man we all can love.
If there is a flaw with the script, however, it's that there is so much of a focus on Frank's exploits that his character rarely shines through. We are given less an image of the man than a detailed pattern of his behaviour. This is a risky venture, since unless the actor portraying Frank is brilliant, which DiCaprio can be, we won't have much to identify with in Frank except his love for his family.
His family itself is an interesting unit, as somewhat described above. His father is a borderline radical, teaching his son often very questionable lessons about the importance of beating the system. His mother prefers just to throw money at her son, treating him almost as an unimportant equal, but her husband treats Frank like a son, trying to guide him through life as best he can. Ultimately, Frank's relationship with his father will make or break Catch Me If You Can - if the chemistry isn't right, if the performance isn't spot on, the audience won't be able to see why this antisocial bourgeois means so much to a man as smart as Frank, or why he even listens to his father in the first place. When reading the script, I kept thinking how great Tom Hanks could be in this role, his image as a role model being warped just enough to show off his underappreciated range (his role in Road to Perdition will have similar undertones). But then when I finished the script I checked online and discovered he was actually playing Joe Shaye, a far less well-developed character than Abagnale Sr, who is being played by Christopher Walken, an actor who probably would have been much better in Hanks' role.
Joe Shaye is the CIA official who finds himself in charge of what is at first a routine tracking of a con artist, and then a nation- (and soon world-) wide manhunt for the most successful con man in history. But his character doesn't have much to do other than that. The character can work, and work beautifully, but it will require a more carefully crafted performance than Hanks normally seems to do in his leading roles. Joe seems to connect with Frank, but for little reason other than he respects his skill. Perhaps they share a similar sense of loneliness, because for all of Frank's success, he rarely gets to connect with another human being. He falls in love, but lives in fear that his intricate web of lies will fall apart, leaving nothing except little Frank, still a teenager and nothing but a drifter.
Though an early draft, the script for Catch Me If You Can reviewed here is written by Jeff Nathanson, still the only screenwriter credited to the project, and therefore can be safely presumed to be a fairly accurate representation of the script being filmed now. In fact, nothing that has been released regarding this film in any way contradicts the screenplay resting before me. It's a smart piece of work, and the storyline is consistently intelligent and surprising (though it may seem like there were a lot of spoilers above, there really weren't - and besides, this is a true story anyway).
One walks away from Catch Me If You Can unable to dislike Frank Abagnale Jr, in spite of the fact that in the end he's just one slick son of a bitch. The same holds true for the script - smart, fast paced and entertaining, and you can easily overlook its potentially troublesome spots. If it's executed just right, Catch Me If You Can will be one likable, slick son of a bitch of a movie, too."
(Review submitted by Hollyfeld.)
Join our Oscar Pool
I've been playing the Yahoo Oscar pool game for a few years now. Last year we had around 80 contestants in our pool. We're doing it again this year. All you need to do is follow this link.
Register if you're not a member already.
Join a Private group
Group ID: 3521
Password: tnmc
Good luck to everybody.
Stay tuned...
That's all folks...
Jean-François Allaire (aka DeadPool)
Questions, comments, praise etc. Email me at deadpool@tnmc.org
Jean-François Allaire is TNMC's first columnist. At only 24 years old he has become a respected entertainment journalist, with his columns appearing in Corona's Coming Attractions and Scr(i)pt magazine. He also writes a monthly column in Screenwriters Monthly entitled 'The Last Word.' Hailing from Montreal this young writer is determined to dig up all the details on the movies before they hit your local theater. If you're part of a movie production then you really need to be talking to him.
