Baseball fans know that the problem with a perfect game is that it’s boring. The pitcher has thrown a work of art—no hits, no home runs, no sacrifices, no bottom-of-the-ninth heroics—but the genius is in the details, not the highlight reel.
Who knows—maybe people were thrown off by Spielberg and his old pal Martin Scorsese trading places this season. Scorsese released Gangs of New York, a fat-budget epic of questionable historical accuracy, but he doesn’t have Spielberg’s talent for convincing us that his movie is at least as important as the actual history. And Spielberg chose to shoot the intimate, personal film critics used to dare him to make. Unlike Scorsese, he’s too much the entertainer to sell it as the sort of personal tour of the soul that Scorsese insists Mean Streets and Raging Bull are.
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Truffaut was only 26 when he wrote The 400 Blows, but even nearing 40 he was still brooding about a lonely postwar youth spent in juvie halls and ratty cinemas. “Even today, when I hear an adult reminiscing regretfully about his childhood, I tend to think he has a very poor memory,” he wrote in the introduction to Four by Truffaut, a 1971 collection of screenplays.
In The 400 Blows‘ closing moment, Antoine, having escaped reform school, stands on a beach, staring out at the ocean with nowhere to go. But Hanratty eventually catches Frank and has him released to help the FBI catch other frauds. They end up sitting across a desk from one another, the apprentice and master, or son and father, the teen Spielberg and old John Ford. Frank never rebuilds his family. He does what you do in life—he moves on, makes one of his own, grows up. No dinosaurs, no Nazis, no historical gravitas. All Catch Me if You Can offers is the execution of a simple story, one that in the telling reveals Spielberg as a master director—even without the highlight reel.
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Jeff Nathanson
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye, Amy Adams, and Jennifer Garner.
