Newsnight Review discussed the new film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, based on a true story.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
It is a film about getting away with it. Does Spielberg get away with it?

PAUL MORELY:
I was thinking the con continues, in a way. Frank Abagnale seems to have performed a wonderful con to get DiCaprio, Spielberg, Hanks, everybody involved, the big heavyweights of Hollywood, to tell his story. It somehow doesn't need and deserve the heavyweights to be involved. When I see a Spielberg poster for a new movie there are certain things I look for. If the music's by John Williams, your heart sinks. There's a formula, the way he makes his films. A lot of them lately, they seem to be phoned in, this one particularly.

MARK LAWSON:
Can't you understand why they all want to do it, though? It's a quite astonishing story.

PAUL MORLEY:
It is and it isn't. Probably a bit like Midnight's Children, 20 years ago, coming off the heat of it, it would have been a more interesting story. In a way it's Spielberg's superhero movie. Spider-Man, Batman, Daredevil. In a way, the Abagnale character is a bit of a superhero. He has superpowers. For a vast amount of the time he's only 16 or 17. I never really got the feeling that he was that young. These people seem to have forgotten what it's like to be young. He didn't smell of teen spirit. DiCaprio, at times, is at school, a school kid. He doesn't look like he's a school kid, it doesn't have that teen energy. It's quite antiseptic, and as usual with Spielberg, over-set design. Every corner of the screen is wonderfully sorted out in terms of the costumes and the look, and the haircuts and the make-up. But I felt, emotionally, with that teenage spirit, all that was lacking. Ultimately, for me, it was...

MARK LAWSON:
But a fantastic scene in which he takes over as their French teacher, and gets away with it. Apart from John Williams's music, Germaine, there are two Spielberg obsessions, which are nostalgia, and fathers and sons. It's all there in this film again.

GERMAINE GREER:
Yes, I would agree with that. It seems to me there's a notion of family affection and closeness which would be regarded as probably nostalgic, or even utopian or something. The relationship between the boy and his father, and his desire to get his father and mother together, even though... And there's also the question about what happened to his education. This kid is brilliant. He puts himself through the Louisiana bar exams in two weeks. I don't find that so very surprising, because there's a huge amount of brilliance out there on the streets, and it's just affected by the fact they are illiterate or that their lives have never been properly organised. The key to this movie is you have to like Leo DiCaprio. You have to really like what he is. He's such an odd creature, with his long fingers and legs, and his narrow torso, and then his round face which looks as if it waiting to be kissed all the time regardless of what he's doing. He's also a cunning and subtle actor. One of the extraordinary things is the way he differentiated between himself after and before he'd been in prison. His entire body language became more guarded, he became watchful. He looked completely different. Make-up will do some of that, but some of that is real cinematic acting. It's hard to know how he will ever grow up. I don't think he could ever play a grown-up, because he's such a strange little alien.

MARK LAWSON:
I don't think he passed the lawyer exam because he was brilliant, it's a rather brilliant joke about how easy it is to become a lawyer. Bill?

BILL BUFORD:
I read the book. The original Frank, it took him three tries to pass the law exam. Part of it was somebody was actually slipping him the answers, but he finally did pass the exam. But that also points to why I like the film. It's actually just a good story. There was a guy, he did these pranks. He walked into a French class on his first day of school and gets bumped by the football thug, and is so pretentious that he can take over the class and be the substitute teacher. That's the beginning of this fraudster's life. I thought it was light and fluffy and fun and ridiculous, and I loved it. You could have imagined it 30 or 40 years ago in black and white.

MARK LAWSON:
I thought it was good fun, but there was something more serious going on, isn't there? It's quite a strong subject. The Clinton presidency was about confidence and charm.

BILL BUFORD:
It's a strong subject, but a constant one. You can you be anybody you want, you can be anything that you tell everybody. Everybody believes what you say. Everybody believes in rules, so if you are the person breaking the rules you can get away with it. Yes, up to a point, but finally, it's not a serious movie. It's a fun movie. I watched it twice, because I watched it when it came out in New York, and to remind myself I watched it again here. Parts of it pale. The family part bit pales, the mum and dad stuff pales. But the basic stuff...

PAUL MORLEY:
It's the kind of movie I would have liked Morecambe and Wise to have made, and now Reeves and Mortimer. Occasionally, Tom Hanks did remind me of Eric Morecambe.

GERMAINE GREER:
One of the things I think about it is that it is well-made.

PAUL MORLEY:
And so it should be.

GERMAINE GREER:
Exactly, but the well-madeness is not something you should sneeze at, I think. I was dreading the structure of the story. We knew it and it was so predictable, but it was so cleverly done, the way that those scenes and flashbacks... I kept thinking, you just stopped me being bored there. They escaped boredom by a hair's breadth about 50 times.

MARK LAWSON:
But he is a populist genius, and it's there in this film.

BILL BUFORD:
Well-made, lovely fluff. Like ice cream.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's just a shame it has to cost so much to make.

GERMAINE GREER:
They'll get their money back!