True Stories 17: 00s—Catch Me if You Can

Most of us might dream about pulling a fast one in various situations and getting away with robbing that bank or stealing a few bucks from someone that has too much already, but we don’t act on those fantasies. Instead, we read novels about people who do those things. We live vicariously through the people who pull off the heists and amass a fortune in shady ways. And we see movies about them. Catch Me if You Can [2002] by Jeff Nathanson is just such a movie.

The film was based on a book, and its title says it all: Catch Me if You Can: The Amazing True Story of the Youngest and Most Daring Con Man in the History of Fun and Profit. A pretty great—and revealing—title! And one that clearly shows the appeal of this particular con man story.

When you talk to people who’ve seen the film, they generally break into a grin and talk about how much fun it was. And it is fun. To see someone pull off these clever deceptions—well, as I said, people might daydream about being able to do such things but they would never do so in real life. The film lets them imagine what that would be like. Take a look at the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71rDQ7z4eFg

Frank Abagnale, Jr. is a dream of a character. He’s flawed from family trauma—and we see the young Frank and what his life was like as a young boy before the family’s broken up. And we see him unable to escape those feelings—which cause him to run away.

So you’ve got this high school kid off on his own, not sure how he’s going to make his way in the world, but he’s bright and decides to take a few shortcuts. And thus begins his life of crime.

But he is a criminal. So how, as the writer, do you make his criminal behavior “fun”? Well, you make choices that focus on the fun. You, to some extent, make the people he’s conning caricatures rather than people we could be sympathetic with. So when he deserts his young fiancée at their engagement party because he’s about to be caught, we don’t think less of him - because her family is one big caricature. If fact, we feel sorry for him because he believes she’ll defy her family and sneak away to meet him at the airport. So what happens at the airport comes as no surprise to us.

And that’s one of the interesting things about this script—it allows us, the audience, to feel sympathy for this criminal, and root for him to win. The film is a good one to study if you’re planning to write a story about someone who shouldn’t have our sympathy but does. It’s a bit of a high-wire act to try and imitate—but a great example of how it’s done.

Copyright © Diane Lake

02Oct22

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