The late Tony Richardson's BLUE SKY was the last of Orion's pre-bankruptcy films to see the light of day, and seems a more fitting swan song for Arthur Krim's widely respected company than, say, CLIFFORD. But despite the director's pedigree (TOM JONES, THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE
RUNNER), this picture feels somehow enervated, perhaps reflecting Richardson's struggles with AIDS during its 1991 filming.
At the dawn of the 1960s, Major Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones), a US Army nuclear engineer, favors underground nuclear testing, despite the preference of army brass for open-air detonations. His wife Carly (Jessica Lange), a Barbie-doll bourgeoise, is slowly being suffocated by domestic torpor
and encroaching age.
Jones is excellent here, as always, but the selling point is clearly Lange's seductive, damaged, mercurial Carly. She is both an American version of BETTY BLUE, allowed the full dramatic range of hysteria, and a more corrosive update of Auntie Mame or Jean Brodie--a charismatic kook whose
eccentricities, in the end, aren't so charming once it becomes clear that she's seriously ill. And despite the implausible quality of some of the melodrama--it's a comparatively muted throwback to the glossy melos of the 1950s--BLUE SKY is a welcome alternative view of domesticity in a field
increasingly devoted to half-baked "family values." leave a comment