Steven Spielberg (98 page)

Whether that is the case, or whether Spielberg was still consciously conning the media by retelling the story, it’s clear that part of him relates nostalgically, but with residual anxiety, to Abagnale’s audacity in bursting into professions where he hardly belonged. Despite its jaunty style, jazzy music, and bright pastel color scheme, the film version of
Catch Me If You Can
has dark undertones, depicting young Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) as desperately trying to construct an alternate identity to escape his depressing background and to impress his troubled father (Christopher Walken) and emotionally distant mother (Nathalie Baye). Spielberg finds a powerful visual metaphor for Frank’s trauma in a jump cut to him running away down a street, into his new life, after a lawyer asks him to choose between his parents. Frank’s elaborate scams, like his false checks, are works of art, the objects of admiration for those he deceives, as well as a form of revenge against a financial system he sees as victimizing his father.

While entertainingly demonstrating how a charming con artist can go far in the world (before his whole house of cards collapses and he winds up in a hellish French jail cell, looking like Jean Valjean in
Les Misérables
)
,
Catch Me If You Can
is also an extended examination of what psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described in 1978 as “the impostor phenomenon.” As I wrote in my biography
Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success
, about another director who may have suffered from that affliction, it is “the fear common to many high achievers that their success is actually based on a fraud. Another psychologist who studied the phenomenon, Joan Harvey, has said that the
sufferer
also has the ‘obsessive fear that sooner or later some humiliating failure would reveal his secret and unmask him as a fraud. Some very famous people have suffered from the feeling all their lives, despite their obvious abilities.’ In such people, ‘because each success is experienced as either a fluke, or as the result of Herculean efforts, a pattern of self-doubt, rather than self-confidence, develops,’ and each success actually intensifies those feelings of fraudulence.”

Catch Me If You Can
provocatively suggests that Spielberg’s many and
deep-seated
anxieties, which he has often discussed as the sources for his creativity, may stem in part from his feeling of being an impostor and his
still-unresolved
feelings about his broken family and their social background. As Harvey noted, “When people perceive themselves as having risen above their roots, it can evoke deep anxieties in them about separation. Unconsciously, they equate success with betraying their loyalties to their family.” Some psychologists trace the impostor phenomenon to unresolved Oepidal tensions, and
Catch Me If You Can
foregrounds such tensions in the scene of father and son both dancing suggestively with the sexy French mother to a Judy Garland song. “Consciously,” Harvey explained, those who suffer from the impostor phenomenon “fear failure, a fear they keep secret. Unconsciously, they fear success.” Unlike Capra, whose career collapsed under the strain of his success, Spielberg has coped remarkably well with his (when Capra met Spielberg in the 1970s, the first thing he asked the younger director was, “What’s with you, except success?”), and yet Spielberg’s anxieties remain largely unabated, as shown by their persistence in his work even after he entered his sixties.

Perhaps his surprising decision to complete his unfinished college degree on May 31, 2002, by doing some independent-study projects at California State University, Long Beach, was a way of rectifying his “betrayal” of his loyalty to his parents when he dropped out of school in 1969 to pursue his film career. “I wanted to accomplish this for many years,” he said, “as a ‘thank you’ to my parents for giving me the opportunity for an education and a career, and as a personal note for my own family—and young people everywhere— about the importance of achieving their college education goals. But I hope they get there quicker than I did.” Getting his bachelor’s degree in Film and Electronic Arts, even at the age of fifty-five (he called it “my longest
postproduction
schedule”), was his way of redeeming some of the “imposture” and confusion of his youth, demonstrating that he could have followed the socially approved path if he had wanted to do so at the time, as well as providing a fatherly example for his own children. That concern is humorously reflected in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
when Indy takes his son, Mutt, to task over his dropping out of college. Spielberg submitted
Schindler’s List
in lieu of the required twelve-minute film project required for graduation, turned in
Amistad
for a black history course, and wrote a term paper about the California coast for his Natural Science course. “It was longer than most, well-written, and no grammatical errors,” said his professor, Donald J. Riesh.

By offering an artistic metaphor for his unorthodox youth in
Catch Me If You Can
, Spielberg let us in on some of his secret fears, ones he can only express fully through his art while “explaining” them deceptively in his interviews. Movie directors, with their professional penchant for making up and embellishing stories, are often prone to creating fables about their own lives to impress the public and burnish their legends. Their “creation myths” often contain elements of imposture. Spielberg’s somewhat surprising choice
of a vehicle for his most autobiographical film to date shows that he identifies these fraudulent traits in himself and connects them directly to the element in his life story that he has mined most obsessively throughout his career as a director, his trauma over his parents’ divorce, a subject he has addressed more candidly in his public statements.

While discussing
Catch Me If You Can
with Martin Scorsese at a Directors Guild of America event, Spielberg said, “It was the first time, I think, on any film that I directed that I pretty much confronted head-on the events and repercussions of divorce.” Frank’s story was a “more literal” reflection of his own family trauma than
E.T.
, Spielberg noted, “and so that was the first thing that attracted me to the subject—that and the fact that I did what [Frank] did once…. The older I get, the more I go back to the early memories to get me to commit to a movie. It takes sometimes something very Freudian to get me to say, ‘Well, this is interesting; I better read beyond page fifty.’”

Spielberg’s concentration on Frank’s painful attachment to his ne’er-do-well father and his anguished disaffection from his mother, who symbolically rejects him by having another child with her second husband (James Brolin), is a reflection of his own “Freudian” trauma. When he left Saratoga for Los Angeles at the time his parents divorced, Spielberg recalled, “I kind of ran away the way Frank Abagnale ran away.” Frank’s eventual rescue by a surrogate father figure, FBI agent Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), a largely fictitious character invented for the film, puts
Catch Me If You Can
even more squarely in the center of Spielberg’s personal and artistic obsessions, setting the story in the same time period (the 1960s) and the same time of life (his young manhood) when he underwent the trauma and began learning how to cope with it.

This story of an artist/faker can also be seen as a metaphor for Jewish identity in America, as Alan Vanneman points out in a 2003 essay for the online magazine
Bright Lights
. He notes that the film “begins deep in the heart of WASPland” and has a recurring motif of Frank being excluded from Christmas celebrations. It shows Frank trying out a variety of social identities to find acceptance in mainstream American society, as minority-group members are often compelled to do (this pattern links the film to Ralph Ellison’s great novel about African American identity,
Invisible Man
). Elements of the Spielberg family pathology are allowed to override Abagnale’s life story. Paula Abagnale, who did not cheat on her husband, is given a gentleman caller, like Leah Spielberg, who married their family friend Bernie Adler. “A close family friend who’s always there when Dad isn’t, who ends up marrying Mom? Well, you can do the math, and so could Steven, and he hasn’t forgotten,” writes Vanneman. Spielberg also “gives us a touching picture of a father and son who love each other but never find the right word to say…. But it’s not in the book…. Spielberg is giving us his dream of overcoming the alienation he’s felt from his own father.” Frank is finally caught by the French police when “it’s Christmas Eve once more, for the fourth time in the picture. The people are gathering at the church for evening service. Spielberg shows us eternal France—beautiful, centuries-old stone buildings, a church hung with
glowing 
lights, an angelic choir singing on the soundtrack. It’s perfect, really, just perfect. Unless you’re a Jew, of course, in which case they turn you over to the Gestapo.”

With Carl Hanratty’s tireless protection (he’s both a benign Javert and the guardian angel in this twist on Capra’s
It’s a Wonderful Life
), Frank finally goes straight and makes a success of himself working for the FBI, helping to catch check forgers. This ironic twist has a somewhat queasy feeling, since Frank is putting other people behind bars by using his craft to protect himself from his own criminal instincts. Spielberg seems to endorse this solution, at least on a conscious level; he said in an interview for the DVD edition that during the filming he listened closely to his FBI technical adviser so he and Hanks would “not do something that would embarrass the FBI.” But the director’s finer artistic instincts lead him to a contrary visual implication. He films the FBI office as a prison of conformism, populated by workers in drab uniform-like clothing, showing Frank behind bars and inside cagelike rooms, and shooting the setting with cold, funereal lighting. Spielberg-
the-reformed
-student at his college graduation resembled Frank-the-FBI-agent: the filmmaker was surrounded by half a dozen bodyguards at the commencement ceremony, and he was driven from the event in a police motorcade. Like Frank, he had become a prisoner of his own achievement.

For a comedy that keeps anxiously insisting on how buoyant it is,
Catch Me If You Can
is a remarkably somber moral fable of innocence corrupted, and for a work of covert autobiography, it is strangely cool and detached toward its protagonist. And though it is set in the past and provides a bittersweet look at a more trusting, less security-conscious time in American life (“something all of us are nostalgic about,” Spielberg observed), like all period films, it is also about the time in which it was made.
Catch Me If You Can
could be seen as an oblique metaphor for America in the Bush years, living beyond its means, reveling in fraud and criminality, pretending to be something it is not, and ultimately facing a disastrous moral reckoning.

T
HE
Terminal
“is, again, me having a reaction to all the darkness of my films in the 1990s and into the 2000s,” Spielberg said. After
Catch Me If You Can
, rather than reverting to another grim subject, he “wanted to do something else that made me smile and could make other people smile. And this is a time that we need to smile.” Nevertheless,
The Terminal
is Spielberg’s most direct and pointed examination of the totalitarian aspects of contemporary America, a Kafkaesque comedy about an innocent foreigner held prisoner in an airport by irrational restrictions imposed by the Department of Homeland Security. Though
The Terminal
is, ultimately, a reaffirmation of the inclusive spirit that welcomed newcomers such as Spielberg’s grandparents to the United States, its sunny optimism is constantly shadowed by the repressive realities of its time. British reviewer Philip French aptly described the film as “Frank Capra’s
The Trial
.”

Like Frank Abagnale and so many other Spielberg protagonists, Tom Hanks’s Viktor Navorski is an outsider, someone struggling to find acceptance in a society that needs his ameliorating influence; and like E.T., he desperately wants to go home. Viktor is trapped at John F. Kennedy International Airport because his country, the mythical Krakozhia, has had a coup since he departed for a visit to New York. Bureaucratic regulations prevent Viktor from being issued a visa, so he waits weeks in the ironically cheery-looking, brightly lit terminal/prison, learning how to survive in a new environment and acquiring the language. In a plot development reminiscent of Capra’s Depression-era comedies, an array of multiethnic airport workers rally to Viktor’s aid, helping him run circles around the fanatically bureaucratic but not entirely unsympathetic Homeland Security official (Stanley Tucci), who ultimately looks the other way when he heads into the city. Spielberg’s direction brilliantly balances subtle shades of comedy and drama and makes the populist themes of the story genuinely heartwarming, despite occasional lapses, such as the goopy romance that develops between Viktor and a neurotic flight attendant played clumsily by Catherine Zeta-Jones. Although the character has her flaws, she is such an unreal beauty that the romance seems too much like traditional Hollywood wish-fulfillment, though it may also stem from Spielberg’s own (fulfilled) fantasies of being a nerd who manages, through his talent and force of personality, to win the hand of a glamorous actress.

The screenplay by Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, based on a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi, was inspired by the bizarre real-life case of a man stuck in Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1998 through 2006. Merhan Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian refugee, initially was forced to live in the terminal after his passport and refugee certificate were stolen. After a while, he refused to leave, and he published an autobiography and became the subject of documentary films and the 1993 French feature film
Tombés du ciel/Lost in Transit
. Although DreamWorks reportedly paid Nasseri $250,000 for the rights to his life story, no mention of him appears in the credits of
The Terminal
or its publicity material, including DreamWorks’ documentaries about the production. A Spielberg spokesman told the
New York Times
, “Mr. Nasseri’s story was an inspiration for the original treatment for
The Terminal
. The film is not his story.”
The Terminal
might have been an even sharper satire of contemporary political reality if its protagonist had been a Middle Eastern refugee rather than a tourist from Eastern Europe. Viktor’s citizenship gives the film a somewhat retro, pre-9/11 feeling (the footage seen on television screens of the Krakozhian fighting is actually taken from the 1989 Romanian revolution), and portraying him as such a lovable, non-threatening outsider tends to soften the challenge he represents to American authority, making the film seem too safely good-natured.