The Spielberg Ending: Catch Me If You Can

Catch Me If You Can was well-received, and those who groused about its ending were probably just doing it habitually: IF directed by Spielberg AND happy ending THEN what a shameless crowd-pleaser. The other thing to complain about with regard to Catch Me If You Can is that it's overlong, which is a viable line of argument, but if you're going to start cutting, please leave the ending alone — it's perfect.

Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) is on the run from his broken home; Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) is chasing him because his own wife and daughter have been lost to another man. There's some external motivation regarding bank fraud as well, but Spielberg has been reënacting his parents' divorce his whole career, and this time it's all on the surface. No sci-fi candy coating, no Peter Pan mythologies, nothing but a caper story on which he hangs his latest lost boy.

The end begins in Montrichard, France, when Carl talks Frank into cuffs after a long flight from the law. Like everyone who runs, Frank wants to be caught, and it's Carl's paternal decency that finally wins over Frank, although there's no question that the fugitive doesn't think Carl is a patch on his own father (Christopher Walken). From Frank's arrest, we skip forward to the flight home — the intervening drama in the French prison serves as the movie's flash-forward opening scene — when Carl lets on that Abagnale Sr. has died … and Frank is off again, escaping from a moving plane and running to the only place he can run: his mother. He stands on the snowy front lawn of the house shared by his mother and the man for whom she left Frank's father, peering in at the half-sister he's never heard of, and he can't get into the swarming police cars fast enough. The sentence for his con artistry is 12 years in a maximum security prison, to be spent in isolation.

There's nothing so tiresome as a lot of plot summary, so suffice it so say that it's the next 10 minutes, where Carl springs Frank from prison into the subtler confinement of an unadorned office and a 9-to-5 job, that make the movie. Grace for grace's sake, with no metaphorical dressing, ending with the simple pleasure of the proxy father and surrogate son working side-by-side with an understanding neither shared with their biological kin. Without this, there is no movie, no payoff for Frank's clever antics, no real resolution. That point is only worth putting so plainly because practically all of Spielberg's endings work this same way; this one just requires the least effort to recognize it.

Introduction | Saving Private Ryan | A.I. | Minority Report | The Terminal

E-mail Sean Weitner at sean at flakmag dot com.