Naughty and Nice

Directed by Steven Spielberg A DreamWorks release Now playing at area theaters

If, as Glengarry Glen Ross puts it, coffee is for closers, Steven Spielberg had better get used to drinking tea. Catch Me If You Can is the third of his movies in a row to falter mightily in its closing minutes, and the disappointment only keeps increasing. To find a Spielberg movie as giddily entertaining as the first two hours or so of Catch Me, you'd probably have to go back to the days of Indiana Jones -- the first one. With his suspiciously pleasing grin and supernatural guilelessness, Leonardo DiCaprio is perfectly cast as teenage con artist Frank Abagnale; he's 28 playing 18, while Frank is 18 pretending to be 28. Abagnale, who now helps the government and corporations catch the kind of crook he used to be, passed himself off as an airline pilot, a pediatrician and an assistant D.A. (among other things), floating on a cloud of bad checks and public confidence until he finally fell to earth. For each new guise, Frank studies cheap novels and TV shows to learn the jargon, which makes sense, but the sequence where he stares up at a suave Sean Connery Bond and then buys a suit "just like the one in the movie" is pure Spielberg, the perfect fusion of movies and dreams. (Frank beams when a newspaper account calls him "the James Bond of the sky," and he takes one pseudonym from the real name of the comic book character The Flash.) You're eating right out of Spielberg's hands, to the extent that when Frank cashes a bogus check and the camera zeroes in on the presidents' faces as the bills are counted out, you don't need the push -- you go right where you're supposed to go.

Unfortunately, try as John Williams' score might to drag the movie into the era of Henry Mancini, Catch Me gets tripped up by the need to psychologize, to pin everything down to Frank's pain over his parents' divorce. (You'd think Spielberg was the only guy whose parents ever split up.) As Hanratty, the FBI agent who spent years tracking him down, Tom Hanks becomes a surrogate father, which might be a nice grace note if the movie didn't have to hammer on it like a chimp on a toy piano. "You've got no one else to call!" he barks, realizing why Frank's placed an impulsive Christmas Eve call to the one man he should be avoiding. As the broken-hearted father hounded into an early grave by the IRS (note the antipathy to authority instilled in early childhood), Christopher Walken is splendidly humbled, his wounded veteran's pride slowly draining out of him. But the movie goes on far too long after Frank's stopped running, grinding its victories into the dirt.

Chicago

There's something slightly irksome about the way Chicago is put together, if only because it seems to be the movie musical that caters to people who don't like movie musicals. Set in Depression-era, tabloid-driven Chi, the movie splits off Kander and Ebb's cracking songs from the rest of the story, setting them in a fantasy nightclub space that is interwoven with the real-life setting. For example, as the prison matron Mama, Queen Latifah sings her big number gussied up like a bejeweled Bessie Smith, but it's inter-cut with scenes of her leading Roxie (Renée Zellweger) to her cell in drab prison grays. But whether it's a concession or a conception (or a little bit of both), first-time director Rob Marshall's gimmick works like a charm. (Which is not to cut any slack for people who can't stomach musicals because "people don't sing in real life": May they be collectively confined to a cell as small as their imaginations.)

Following in Stanley Donen's footsteps, Marshall is a choreographer turned director, and the movie's dance sequences fall together like little bits of magic, though the faux-retro salaciousness sometimes comes off more Broadway crass than le jazz hot (and Catherine Zeta-Jones is too hippy for her high-cut costumes). With no movement to cut around, ballads fare less well, and apparently no amount of training can teach Zeta-Jones how to dance (Bebe, we hardly knew ye). Zellweger, though, proves to be an honest-to-goodness triple threat; while hardly a belter, she finds her way into Roxie's go-getter bite, and she's as light on her feet as any good comic actress. Who knew, what's more, that Richard Gere had been hiding a mean lyric tenor all these years? Chicago may not rank with the classics, but it's the best traditional movie musical in many a moon.

Talk to Her

Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar A Sony Pictures Classics release Now playing at Ritz Five

It's notable that Michael Cunningham's The Hours shows up on a bedside table in Pedro Almodóvar's newest movie, because in a way, it more fully seizes the notion of improbable emotional connections than the novel's upcoming movie adaptation. The plot takes so many turns, it's unfair to reveal too much, but its basis is the relationship that develops between two men -- Benigno (Javier Cámara) and Marco (Darío Grandinetti) -- who are both attached to comatose women, the former professionally, the latter romantically. In fact, they first connect while watching a dance performance, when Benigno notices Marco tearing up, and it's a key clue to Almodóvar's real subject: the way fictions, either those created for us or the ones we create ourselves, fill the gaps between people, for good or for ill. Repeatedly making nods to other types of art --including a mesmerizing silent-film interlude, filmed by the director, which is transportingly beautiful but hides a sinister meaning -- Talk to Her perhaps spreads itself too thin, but it's a movie about passions, so if they overrun, it's almost appropriate.

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Miramax has been holding onto two of Phillip Noyce's movies, and while the supposedly touchy The Quiet American sits on the the shelf, this fairly harrowing chronicle comes out just in time for the holidays. It might be time to check Noyce's front bumper for traces of Harvey Weinstein's schnauzer. Timing notwithstanding, it's nice to see Noyce stepping away from Hollywood dreck like Clear and Present Danger and literally bringing it all back home, to his native Australia. Based on a true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence is set in Western Australia in 1931, when mixed-race aboriginal children were regularly stripped from their families by their government "protector," Neville (Kenneth Branagh), and sent to government schools, supposedly so the "half-castes" might be more readily bred into white society, thus preventing the creation of "an unwanted third race." (The practice, incidentally, continued until 1970.) The titular fence, called the largest in the world, ran the length of the Australian continent, and it was that fence that the story's three girls used to find their way 1,200 miles home. (That the fence, used to keep rabbits from swarming the farmland of Western Australia, doubles the government's plans to keep the races unmixed isn't played up as much as it could be, perhaps for the better.) This brief tale, more effectively than the ponderous American, exposes the 20th-century fallout of manifest destiny's last gasp -- governments that sought to conquer through management and intrigue rather than all-out occupation. Rabbit-Proof Fence is a simple story, told mainly with non-actors, but if Noyce's technique kills the feel of neo-realism, it lends lyricism and poignancy. If not on the level of Walkabout or The Last Wave (both of which, like Rabbit-Proof Fence, feature actor David Gulpilil, who offers a perfect, near-wordless performance as the native tracker sent to find the girls), it's a solid, heartfelt work worth seeing before it quickly vanishes.

Antwone Fisher

Directed by Denzel Washington A Fox Searchlight release Now playing at area theaters

Antwone Fisher's story is touching (though, unfortunately, not so rare): A young black man beats unspeakable odds, working through his righteous anger, finding his long lost family and, in the movie version, helping his shrink to be a better man, too.

After he responds to a white Navy shipmate's taunting with a violent outburst (apparently not unusual), Fisher must endure three sessions with the base shrink, Dr. Jerome Davenport (Washington). Antwone's indignant, but the good doctor is patient. Eventually, he knows, Antwone will talk. He has to. He's got a story that will touch everyone.

This story is, as such stories tend to be, both terrible and inspirational. (The movie is based on Fisher's autobiographical script.) Born in the Ohio State Correctional Facility to a drug-addicted mother, his father murdered months before he's born, Antwone is given over to the state, then raised by a foster mother, Mrs. Tate (Novella Nelson), as dreadful a matriarch as has ever appeared on screen. By the time he's a teenager, 'Twone is living on the street; following yet another trauma, he joins the Navy.

Here he repeatedly takes out his righteous rage against the men on his ship. Each fight lands him back in the doctor's vicinity and steers him to another disclosure, some dark secret -- cruelty, abandonment, violence -- from long ago. These sessions turn movie-style cuddly, despite Davenport's efforts to maintain a professional reserve. Soon Antwone is visiting the doctor's home, meeting his wife, Berta (Salli Richardson), and having Thanksgiving with the extended family, who grump and compete with each other. This may be the film's most complex moment, as Antwone contemplates an imperfect family, though nothing so horrible as his own experience.

Antwone's efforts to reach a "truth" about his family, to understand and forgive the violence of "slave community" (after the John Blassingame book Davenport has him read), focus eventually on Mrs. Tate and his mother, Eva (Viola Davis), whom he finally tracks down. In this context, it's understandable but sad that Eva's story remains wholly unspoken -- she literally can't say a word once he starts telling her how strong and good he is, in spite of her terrible neglect. While Davis' remarkable face and restrained performance in these three minutes let you in on some of Eva's own anguish, the film maintains its direct line, from Antwone's telling to his healing. This single-mindedness reduces the story's obvious complexity. It surely does touch everyone, but Antwone Fisher doesn't always show how.

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