Dear Dad — you always told me that an honest man has nothing to fear, so I'm trying my best not to be afraid.
I floated the idea of a TBS canon when writing about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles — a sort of normcore cohort of good-but-not-fine movies whose pop cultural imprint has somehow never quite convinced me of their viewership, and right after doing so a friend wrote in suggesting Catch Me If You Can as a worthy entrant. And, indeed, I know the movie poster extremely well despite having never seen it.
It's a stretch to draw too many parallels between the two films (both now-rote plots largely carried by the sheer charisma of the leads and their winning chemistry, et cetera), but whereas Planes, Trains, and Automobiles had to win me over from my default position of "road trip movies are kind of boring" — here I was in from minute one, completely sold into this universe. Spielberg is at the peak of his powers: Christopher Walken delivers an absolute knockout performance with every second of his limited screen time, and DiCaprio — always an actor who felt like he was in conversation with a version of himself whom I had never seen — well, I get it now, this is the guy, this is the urtext which Killers of the Flower Moon destroys.
The movie does such a good job of selling you in its first two thirds with a sense of verve and playfulness (the John Williams score!) that the few moments of somberness hit you with affectation. The two truly dark scenes: DiCaprio's character meeting his father at a bar and understanding that the house of cards around which he's built his life has fallen, and then him peering in at his mother's house to understand there is no going back — do not feel cheap, do not feel schmaltzy. There is an emotional texture to this film that beggars comparison to Wolf of Wall Street: once you stop moving, once you catch your breath and the world settles around you, you realize you are alone, and so you better keep running.
(The kicker, the perfect kicker: the person about whom this story is ostensibly written made it all up. A perfectly meta-textual long con!)
★★★★