This lovely little film, nearly lost in the bankruptcy of Orion Pictures in 1992, is primarily a vehicle for the outstanding performances of its two lead actors, Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones. Lange won the Academy Award for Best Actress as a result of her portrayal of military wife and sex-bomb wannabe Carly Marshall.
Major Hank Marshall (Jones), a nuclear weapons expert, is stationed in Hawaii, the ideal posting as far as his wife is concerned. Carly spends her days posing on the beach in provocative swimwear, paging through Hollywood magazines, and swimming topless in the sea, preferably in front of an audience. Yet despite her often outrageous behaviour, including shamelessly flirting with other men, she loves her husband (“Daddy”) and the Major desperately loves her and thus he forgives her peccadilloes, of which there are apparently many. The Marshalls have two daughters.
Carly’s antics, as well as Marshall’s unwillingness to cover up the dangers of nuclear testing, soon cause the Major and his family to be transferred from “paradise” to a base in Alabama. As their car pulls up to the dowdy house in which they will live until the next transfer, Carly is visibly transformed, the carefree dreamer lapsing into sullen silence. The sullenness erupts into screaming, destructive rage when she enters the house and sees the mess that has been left by the previous occupants. The storm subsides only when the long-suffering Major corners his wife in a fabric store after a brief car chase and her fury is exhausted. In less than twenty minutes of Blue Sky, Lange has displayed more range than most actors could hope to muster in a lifetime of performances.
Carly is welcomed by the other military wives on the base, but it is clear from the outset that she does not fit in to the staid social life expected of an Army spouse. Unable to control her raging libido, she catches the roving eye of Colonel Johnson (Powers Boothe), the base commander, at an officers’ club social and after the Major refuses to dance with her, she joins the colonel in what Roger Ebert calls “a dance…that is just this side of vertical foreplay.” Marshall interrupts this very public display and throws his wife into the swimming pool.
Obviously aiming to sleep with Carly, Johnson has Marshall temporarily transferred to an underground nuclear test site in Nevada. While the inevitable tryst occurs on the Alabama base, only to be accidentally witnessed by the Marshalls’ older daughter and the colonel’s son, Marshall is ready to blow the whistle when the test in the desert exposes two unwitting cowboys to severe radiation.
Things head downhill from this point, especially for the poor Major. He returns to Alabama having learned of his wife’s infidelity and determined to expose the Army’s culpability in the irradiation of the cowboys. In a confrontation with Johnson he strikes the colonel and is soon arrested. Johnson tricks Carly into having her husband committed and the Major is drugged into a stupor. Seeing her husband in this condition brings out a streak of courage and determination in Carly that has been hinted at throughout the story but has been generally overshadowed by her blond-bombshell behaviour. The bold act she subsequently performs saves the Major and results in the arrest of Vince Johnson.
While the movie is entertaining, there are too many implausibles and too many coincidences in the plot for Blue Sky to be a great film. What does make it well worth watching—and watching again—is the fine acting of its principals. Under her flighty and promiscuous exterior, Lange’s Carly is a complex and intelligent character with a capacity for fierce loyalty to the man she loves beyond all others and the courage to prove that love. Jones’s portrayal of the Major is subtle, understated, and utterly believable.
Image Credit
Blue Sky Movie Poster@ Wikipedia
Recent Ross Lonergan Articles:
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Four
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Three
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part Two
- The Film-School Student Who Never Graduates: A Profile of Ang Lee, Part One
- Bullying, Fear, And The Full Moon (Part Four)
Please Share Your Thoughts - Leave A Comment!