OXFORD FILM APPRECIATION SOCIETY
Catch Me If You Can: A Carol To The Lonely-Hearted
Eleanor Zhang
Ever since the start of this month, I’ve started receiving the question I know I’m dreading to hear, this year of all years: Where will you spend your Christmas?
A fact unknown to most people is that throwing this ordinary inquiry at an expat, a go-to conversation starter that usually triggers garrulous excitement, is like asking a Mandalorian where home is. And while the heavy armour you’re used to for the rest of the year may cover up any awkward expressions on your face, you’re still going to be reminded of your status as a Christmas orphan: coming from a culture that doesn’t celebrate the birth of Christ as the start of a new year, end of December usually features accepting kind invitations to different households, along with their different choices of Christmas films. The pandemic demands a responsibility one should take upon oneself to minimise contact, which is why this year could well be the first time I’ll spend Christmas alone, on an evening dedicated to family gatherings that some others would no doubt rather be exempted from.
Last night I was watching Alan Ball’s latest film Uncle Frank, a story about a gay college professor in the 70s being reaccepted into his family he assumed would reject him. “I have no family,” he said. The ending was moving because he is proved wrong, but what really poked my heart is the moment Frank’s lover Wally, an immigrant from Saudi Arabia, makes a call to his mother: he talks animatedly in Arabic, in a see-through phone box on a random street in South Carolina. The entire scene looks like one of those miniatures you keep in a Christmas ball, insulated yet all so brittle, floating, untethered, on a vast foreign land. This is it, I thought. This is the year to watch the one film, about another Frank, that I’ve never dared watching on Christmas Eve.
Catch Me If You Can is based on the early life of Frank Abagnale, now a security consultant, who also inspired the crime series White Collar. Among the few people eligible to challenge the charm of Matt Bomer's portrayal of Neal Caffrey is Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the role of the prodigy con man who, before the age of 22, posed as a pilot, a doctor, and a parish prosecutor, all while amassing a great fortune through impeccable check forgery. As Abagnale works, the persevering FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks) is close on his heels, who has been tracing him down ever since his first crimes as a teenager. Parallel to the string of adrenaline-pumping cons is a misfit's coming-of-age story — traumatised by his parents’ divorce, Frank has set his mind on retrieving his family, believing that restoring their material affluence will piece back together the lost home from his childhood memory.
What makes the story more than a blockbuster crime comedy is its effort to keep the two sides of Frank pressed firmly together. (To wit: “the audience can think of them as a villain, but not you” — advice from Aaron Sorkin on screenwriting.) The film’s narrative defies the chronological temporal order typical of a biographical story, and adopts instead a mishmash of events from both past and present, all explicitly presented. Rather than inflicting confusion on the audience, this storytelling structure only strengthens the plot’s cause-effect relationship: between Frank’s various criminal activities, we are also let in on his motivation deriving from much less exciting settings.
Among these scenes is that of Frank spending a December night at his fiancée’s house. As the Lutheran family gather on the sofa, engrossed in their singalong performance to their favourite Christmas tune, we see Frank stuck between them, struggling to follow the Irish song he’s never heard of, with an embarrassed yet somewhat content smile on his face. “Keep pushing that lie. Keep pushing till you make it true,” he later reflects. Watching him, a con man but also just a fellow Christmas orphan, doing his best to mime the part of belonging somewhere – to a family that can burst into its own special festive song - evokes too many of my own Christmas memories.
We watch this scene knowing that he can’t fit in her fiancée’s family, not due to incompetence, but namelessness: his lack of home is his bane, forcing him not only into crime, but also a state of anonymity. It is therefore more deplorable and less despicable that he is even engaged under a fake family name. What follows are the extreme measures designed to sate his craving for a link, however tenuous, to something resembling a family. He starts calling Carl every Christmas, the man that incarnates the constant potential of his capture, but also, in the role of a pursuer, serving as the only person who’s always been around in his life. The ever-present fear and insecurity have gradually transformed into his unique sense of belonging, and which eventually brings him not only protection, but also salvation.
On the night of Christmas Eve, Frank is captured in the French town of Montrichard, where his parents first met during the war. After being confronted and warned by Carl in his check-forging workshop, what convinces him to surrender is not the imminent danger of dying under the French police’s gunpoints, but honesty from Carl, sworn on his only daughter. It is his remaining faith in parental love sacrosanct against falsehood and betrayal, and not the fear for his own life, that saves him from a tragic fate. In the background, the village choir sings carols on the church’s stairs; in the foreground, Carl bangs on the police car’s rear window, promising Frank safety, but more importantly, home: “I’ll have you extradited back to the United States. Don’t worry.” What better place for a prodigal son to return home, than the town where his family started; and what better time to do so than on Christmas Eve?
Frank’s last attempt at escape is made when his trust in absolute honesty with family matters is broken. In reaction to Carl’s disclosure of his father’s death, violating the cop’s promise of giving him the chance to speak to him, he runs away to his mother’s house. Seeing her with her new family, a perfect Christmas scene just a window away, completely shatters his dream. What’s heartbreaking is not only the moment he touches fingers with his sister, who he never knew existed, and now has everything he’s ever wanted, but the way police cars’ red siren bulbs blend seamlessly with the family house’s blinking Christmas decorations - lights from two worlds inhabit the same frame, yet in cruelty signal two distinctly different fates.
What overwhelms me the most is the timing: such a discrepancy culminates in drastic clarity on Christmas Eve, when the world is divided into only two kinds: the ones who belong and the ones who don’t; the innocent little girl who spends the evening in comfort and joy, and the criminal boy who will be driven away and given twelve years in prison.
But just like every other story of a lonely heart, Catch Me If You Can also finds its denouement in a new beginning. As the ending credits roll, we learn that the biographical Frank has built his own family, founded a career, and remained in a lifelong friendship with Carl. I suppose there are two ways to interpret Christmas: for those who already belong, they should hope to keep belonging; for those who don’t, try reaffirming the hope that you will one day. There will come a year when Ron Kirby finds his Cary to spend Christmas on his Thoreauan farm, and when Frank Abagnale, after years of catch and run, finds a father figure in the least likely person. Maybe who catches whom doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is the conviction delivered in Uncle Frank’s last line: “We were all exactly where we were supposed to be.”
