The only real reason to see Baz Luhrmann’s current adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” are Leonardo DiCaprio’s hands. For fans of digits–Samuel Delaney is our patron saint–DiCaprio has a fine pair of pencil pushers, a little padded at the tips, with lots of flesh between knuckle and the first joint. One doesn’t necessarily associate DiCaprio with pencils or any writing instruments let alone thought but watching his long and meaty hands clenched in amazement or wonder just beneath his Jay Gatsby tuxedo sleeves reminds one of the 1974 “Great Gatsby,” and Mia Farrow tapping her little gold pencil against her champagne glass at a Gatsby party as she encourages her husband, Tom, who’s full of lust, to borrow her writing instrument and take down a chorine’s phone number. Farrow’s voice was perfect as Daisy: carelessness on the winds, like her scarf in the winds, I never understood why that movie tanked. Perhaps because of Robert Redford’s hands, which always look as if they should be throwing a baseball, or have just thrown a baseball? Redford was attractive in his ice-cream colored Gatsby suits but he did not evoke what Bjork once sang about from a hand fan point of view: “His fingers promise exciting sex.” DiCaprio’s hands are big as dreams. You know the one, where he puts a little rouge or scent on your lips with his thumb and then wipes it all off with his index finger as softly or as hard as a kiss.
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