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Based on the truly story of Frank Abagnale, Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), it's the swingin' 50's and 15-year-old Frank is having a rough time. His parents on the verge of financial collapse, mom soon splits (Nathalie Baye), leaving dad (Christopher Walken, in an Oscar-nominated performance) to pick up the pieces. But Frank Jr. decides to run, and run he does. Over the next five years, he will orchestrate one of the most famous scams in American history. With FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) hot on his trail, Abagnale weaves a trail of ingenious cons and broken hearts, successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, an assistant attorney general and a history professor. Along the way he passes more than $2.5 million in fraudulent checks across 26 countries. Like all criminals, no matter how smart, he will eventually be caught. But more important is what redemption, if any, lies at the end of the runway.

Catch Me If You Can is one of those movies I thoroughly enjoyed every single minute of, even if it left me with no lasting emotional residue. Everything about it is right where it should be, with tongue firmly planted in cheek: great cast, great look, great score and, or course, you've got Spielberg directing it. Having not read Frank Abagnale, Jr.'s own book, I can't say how much more depth he goes into about what was going through his mind while pulling off his incredible escapades. The film, however, doesn't scratch very deep beneath the surface. Any caper movie like this lives and dies by the gags its protagonist tries to pull off, and generates its suspense by stringing us along with how he's going to con his way out of all his last-minute scrapes. Spielberg and DiCaprio handle all of the expected scenarios with wit and charm (impersonating a flight officer, his first big day on the job at a hospital, etc.), and the pace is surprisingly snappy given the film's rather overlong 121-minute runtime. Yet oddly enough, the near-screwball antics suffer from being a bit too tame; we're left with a film stuck in the middle, as if Jeff Nathanson's script can't quite decide whether it wants to be an all- out comedy or a dark drama. Guess you can't have your cake and eat it, too.

The real heart of this movie lies in the relationship between the two Franks, Jr. and Sr., which is paralleled effectively in the Hanks-DiCaprio cat-and-mouse game. Walken has some great scenes, and by the climax, we are somehow again in classic Spielberg territory, the lost boy gazing mournfully through a window at the nuclear family that long ago abandoned him. Some expressed surprise at Spielberg's choice to direct Catch Me If You Can, once again proclaiming it a "departure" for the "escapist" Spielberg. But here he returns to his same familiar themes - broken families that can never quite be put back together again, the disparity between seeing and believing, and an ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances. Leave it to the most successful modern filmmaker of the past half-century to once again take subject matter that seems impossible to Spielberg-ize and... do the impossible.

I don't want to sound down on Catch Me If You Can. It is great entertainment, everyone looks like they had a great time making it, and the fun is infectious. Still, I couldn't help but wonder why, after it was all over, it so quickly dissolves from the memory. Where is this film going to be ten, twenty years from now? A basic cable staple for sure, but could it have been more? Who knows? So let's just revel in what is amazing about Catch Me If You Can, which is how fanciful Spielberg waves his wand this time around. Not since the early days has he been this light on his feet. Catch Me If You Can is essentially one big con game of a movie, but this time we don't feel ripped off at the end, we feel elated.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Another winner from DreamWorks. I caught Catch Me If You Can in the theater last Christmas, and it had a wonderful retro-gloss quality that is faithfully recreated here. Once again working with Oscar-winning director of photography Janiusz Kaminski, Spielberg has great fun with all the period detail, jazzy colors and soft-focus glamour. It certainly makes the film look a bit dated, but hey, isn't it supposed to? What fun! (DreamWorks is releasing Catch Me If You Can in separate anamorphic widescreen and full screen versions; reviewed here is the widescreen edition, which is presented in its matted 1.85:1 theatrical aspect ratio.)

Everything that makes a great transfer is here in abundant supply. Pristine print, rock solid blacks and, despite plenty of overpumped shots with blown-out whites, clean and consistent contrast across the entire grayscale. Given Kaminski's penchant for low speed film stocks and framing everyone's head with a high-key halo, it is not surprising that there is a bit of grain in some of the darker scenes, and the film is hardly razor sharp. But the film's color palette, awash in pastels and sometimes muted grays and blues, comes through with great clarity and precision. Detail is overall very good given such tricky source material, with even fine textures apparent, although again due to the high-contrast effect shadow delineation may be a notch below the best transfers. But with only minimal signs of edginess and no apparent compression artifacts, it is hard to find fault much here. Catch Me If You Can on DVD looks just like I remember it in the theater, a fizzy 60's-era concoction that is a total delight.

Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?

As jazzy as the picture is the soundtrack, which is a bit of a departure for maestro John Williams. This guy has won so many Oscars one almost has to sit down just thinking about it, but Catch Me If You Can is a delightful change of pace for a composer that, quite frankly, I've found a bit dull in recent years. Here, his style harks back to his early days doing easy-listening jazz, all lush snap, crackle and pop. His score is the highlight of this film's soundtrack, and comes across wonderfully.

The score is nicely spread out across the entire front soundstage, with a strong presence in the surrounds even if it isn't incredibly aggressive. There are some noticeable discrete effects that pop up from time to time in the rears, mostly during transitions and anything involving an airplane, but generally atmosphere is limited. So important to a "talky" picture like this, dialogue is rendered with precision, nicely balanced with the omnipresent score and benefiting from expansive dynamic range. Since Williams' score isn't really bass-heavy, the .1 LFE track isn't given much chance to shine, but underscores the action nicely.

Usually with restrained soundtracks like this, I am unable to tell much difference between a DTS and Dolby Digital track, which at first seemed to be the case here. But comparing five different scenes throughout the film, I began to detect a wider sense of spatiality, tighter imaging and more distinct surround presence on the DTS. It is minor, but delicacies to the timbre are a bit more lifelike and pans and front-to-back effects slightly more transparent. The low end, while again still subtle, is slightly deeper and more realistic as well. The Dolby Digital track is certainly fine in its own right, but the DTS wins this one by the wide nose of an airplane.

Rare for a DreamWorks title, a number of alternate language options are provided. Included is a French Dolby 5.1 dub and an optional English Dolby 2.0 surround track, plus English captions (encoded as subtitles) and French and Spanish subtitles.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Are you a fan of Steven Spielberg? Well, then you probably already know what to expect here. Pop in disc one, and you'll find no extras at all - just the main feature wisely given a whole dual-layer disc to itself to run around in. (Only the odd triple-menu system annoys; pop in the disc and be greeted by a text- less menu with three options. All take you to the same menu, just with a different design based on the film's title sequence. Cute, but rather confusing at first.)

Disc two is were all the supplemental action is at. However, despite all the little pieces, there really is far less here than meets the eye. Let's start with the slighter extras first. We get a nice set of cast and crew biographies, many with small (3 to 5 images apiece) still galleries of the respective participant, plus two sets of productions notes ("A Colorful Time" and "A Colorful Place") and a very spiffy, very comprehensive still gallery with three sections: "Cast," "Behind the Scenes" and "Costume Design." Quite extensive, I counted nearly 200 stills in all, and the interface is cute and the navigation simple if very easy to use. Nothing extravagant here, but perfectly captivating. No theatrical trailers at all are included.

The only other extra is an 82-minute documentary broken up into the requisite little parts. Once again produced by longtime Spielberg documentarian Laurent Bouzereau and his team, there were probably plenty of different ways they could have gone with this subject matter, but by and large they stick to the usual suspects. We get a little bit on the movie, the casting, the real Frank Abagnale, and more in-depth looks at the costumes, the locales and the FBI. In sheer technical terms, the doc is a bit spotty. While all the behind- the-scenes and interview footage was shot in 1.78:1, it is presented here in non-anamorphic widescreen. A mistake, or intentional? Weird to be sure. Unfortunately, this results in a softer and more jagged appearance to much of the footage, and it can't touch the superior making-of material on last fall's Minority Report DVD. In a nice touch, however, all of the video material offers subtitle options in English, French and Spanish.

The doc is broken down into six parts, each focusing on a different aspect of the film: "Behind the Camera" (17 min.), "Cast Me If You Can" (30 minutes, broken down into five sub-segments on each actor [Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken and Nathalie Baye, and Jennifer Garner]), "Scoring Catch Me If You Can" (6 min.), "Frank Abagnale, Jr.: Between Reality and Fiction" (17 min.), "The FBI Perspective" (7 min.) and "In Closing" (4 min.). All of the above are interviewed extensively on the set, along with most of the main crew, including screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, producer Walter Parkes, production designer Jeannine Oppewall, costume designer Mary Zophres and composer John Williams. It is the usual cavalcade of talent only a filmmaker of Spielberg's stature could command.

Coming off of the last couple of Spielberg two-disc DVD sets, however, I couldn't help but feel like it may be too much of the same, only slighter. The light-as-a-feather touch works for the movie, but a documentary on a real-life subject that is as serious as this longs for more insight. Certainly, there is plenty of great stuff here, and Bouzereau's you-are-there video diary approach again reminds us why that style pays such dividends. Watch for a moment with Walken, who improvises a tearful moment in a key scene; not only do we get the Spielberg, and DiCaprio recollecting the event in the interviews, but we also get to witness it right there on the set, as it is happening. It is this sort of intimacy that the DVD format is best at conveying, yet it is still rarely exploited on even the biggest studio releases. More of this would have really elevated this doc. Other highlights include Hanks joking around with Abagnale between takes, and an all-too-brief discussion with Spielberg on what convinced him to make a "bon bon of a movie" about a felon who stole millions.

Other sections, especially "Between Reality and Fiction" and "The FBI Perspective," seem to miss their best bets entirely. Abagnale is a charming guy, but more background (perhaps even in text form?) would have helped flesh out this material, and the FBI segment with the film's technical advisor William Rehder is totally formula. This is a tricky film and tricky subject matter, but like the final product, this doc seems more interested in the charm and fun of it all, rather than any of the ironic or darker aspects inherent in the material. While I have quite enjoyed all of the other recent Spielberg DVDs, I hope for the next one they shake it up a little bit and give us some new stuff to chew on. Still, this is as classy a doc as you're likely to find.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

No ROM extras have been included.

Parting Thoughts