Well acted but silly film

Some Oscar wins just don’t hold up to scrutiny and in the case of 1994’s Best Actress, they certainly don’t. It’s not that Jessica Lange doesn’t give it her all in “Blue Sky”. It’s that its in the service of very little. Tony Richardson’s 1950’s military base-set film meanders on and on with so many different subplots that in the end all the crossed storylines can do is amount to a purposeless soap opera.

Lange plays Carly, the wife of the Army’s leading nuclear radiation hazard scientist, Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones). At first stationed at a base in Hawaii, Carly seems to relish the chance to sunbathe topless on the beach and arrives wearing the flashiest of clothes that makes her look like a Hollywood starlet. Her dream was to be Brigitte Bardot. Instead, she married Hank.

The army is none-to-pleased with her wild antics, which is partly why the Marshall’s and their two daughters end up getting re-stationed to a new base. The place is an Alabama shithole, which prompts Carly to fly into an uncontrolled histrionic rage and take the car for a joyride before being talked down by Hank. We can discern that she’s thrown a tantrum like this before. Her daughters believe she’s manic depressive, but Hank seems to think it’s par for the course and will take it if it also means he gets to bask in her high spiritedness. As his daughter’s say, “mom is crazy and dad is blind”.

Now let’s take a look at this for a second. Hank is pretty much a very mild-mannered scientist..and he’s married to a woman who looks like Jessica Lange. He seems fairly lucky, plus she really needs him to keep her on the straight and narrow and she loves to call him “daddy”. I think most men would take this.

The whole thing feels like a fantasy of co-dependence and males wanting to feel needed by the most beautiful woman in the world. Sure, this woman likes to dance seductively, sometimes with other men, and she flies into rages and is capable of doing some extremely selfish things to satisfy her own wants. But she knows that Hank gives her what no one else can- he protects her, and doesn’t make her feel crazy.

But she is though and rather than be a portrait of the illness (we believe she’s bipolar), the film becomes more a series of scenes where she does one unstable thing after another and then asks for forgiveness. Not only that but the film eventually seems to shift gears into a whole new storyline involving a bomb test and subsequent military coverup involving shipping Hank off to the mental hospital, and oddly, in the most contrived of ways, Carly’s crazy becomes just the ticket to saving her husband and exposing it all.

Lange and Jones do work well together; she is a lot of dysfunction all dressed up in pretty dresses and party girl antics, and what’s best is that we can still see what she gets from Hank as well as how her own behaviors get away from her in her moments of ecstasy. And Jones is just as good, playing a man who seems to like the idea of being the male to his wife and daughters, even though in this case, handling everything is beginning to exhaust him.

I felt there were far more interesting avenues for this dysfunctional family drama to go though than to just have Lange continue to be the same mess over and over again. And I definitely felt plotlines that turn her into a skank and homewrecker, into a ditzy wife who ironically commits her husband, and, especially, into the lunatic who saves the day were wildly unrealistic. This is one of those movies that feels underfed in the first half, while the second exposes the screenplay for the silliness it always was.