by Nick Taylor
If you had approached me on the street and asked if I was a Jessica Lange fan, I would have answered with an emphatic “duh!” But since you clicked on this link, I'm coming to you through your screen to tell you this informatioin. Having originally met Lange in high school via the actress-heavy ordeal that is American Horror Story, watching her communicate an actual character amidst so much lurid, proudly threadbare plotting was revelatory to witness. Lange served Ryan Murphy’s baroque and sentimental grotesqueries with leonine force. Even as subsequent seasons leaned too heavily on her characters as pillars to be toppled, and it became all too easy to project Lange’s distaste towards her surroundings into her vainglorious Supreme and dissatisfied ringleader, she gives a hell of a good show, finding ways to keep herself amused and visibly gratified (or maybe relieved) to play off her talented co-stars. I haven’t touched the show in years, and still I can remember her broken line reading of “in the gloaming” as she stumbles through a crowd of patients in Asylum, her bitchy, hilarious refusal to act like she’s invading anyone’s space when she saunters through the Murder House despite no longer owning it.
On the strength of this output I quickly searched for her star-making performances in Frances and Tootsie, which further cemented my impression of her as a supernova capable of great versatility. I’ve seen plenty of other films she’s starred in, yet as her 75th birthday approached, I realized there was a major blind spot I needed to correct. How on Earth have I not seen any of Jessica Lange’s post-1982 Oscar nominations? I’ve spent the past week pouring over those features, and though Country and Sweet Dreams are perhaps in greater need of reappraisal, I’ve found pouring over Blue Sky to be the most rewarding, and the most fun to try pinning down. So, without further ado - Happy 75th Birthday, Jessica Lange...
I'm sure some of you reading this article might consider the title a bad joke. "How haven't you? More like why did you?!" Oscar’s 1994 Best Actress lineup is even more derided than its 1984 vintage, and I have no reason to argue otherwise. Although Blue Sky was completed in 1991, the death of director Tony Richardson and bankruptcy of Orion Pictures delayed its release by three years. It’s just impossible to imagine Lange nabbing the Oscar for any of the years Blue Sky sat on the shelf, let alone if it had come out in 1991 against Silence of the Lambs. But even as we should champion the many better actresses who were inexplicably left aside for even weaker sauce served by Susan Sarandon in The Client and Miranda Richardson in Tom & Viv, I’m not really bummed about Oscar deciding to reward one of the most exciting actresses of the past decade for a role that reflects her house style more accurately than her Tootsie win, as perfect as that performance is.
Is it sacreligious to say I had a good time with this? Blue Sky is not the hidden gem or the Lange showcase Country or Sweet Dreams indelibly provide. But it does have a jagged, engaging momentum to it, never quite settling into a stable formal or narrative rhythm despite its very middlebrow impressions. Set in 1962, the film opens on military nuclear engineer Hank Marshall (MVP Tommy Lee Jones) sweeping a Hawai’ian beach via helicopter for radiation fallout. After following chatter on the radio he flies to a site of heavy activity, and finds his wife Carly (Lange) sunbathing topless and giddily waving to the other choppers. Her joy at their attention veers past exhibitionism into something more delusional, a willingness to embarrass/threaten herself and her family Blue Sky will explore throughout its two hour runtime. Hank pretends to laugh this off for his military buddies, but Jones communicates a deep shame at his wife’s actions, clearly a longstanding routine that hasn’t dulled her impudence or his hurt.
Their dynamic suggests Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby after twenty years of parenthood, routine instability via his job-mandated moves and her unpredictable behaviors, and very passionate love. The deeply authentic relationships Lange evokes with the actors playing her family is a consistent boon across her career. For all her supernova energy, Lange never sucks the oxygen out of the room, and she galvanizes her screen partners to respond to her as fully as she does to them. Her rapport with Jones carries years of history and complicated emotions. Both of them possess that unique talent of retaining their singular acting styles, harmonizing with
The film, thankfully, does not use the nuclear energy conceit as a larger metaphor for Hank learning how to handle Carly. In fact, husband and wife prove themselves to be equally disruptive to their new base when Hank is relocated to Alabama as punishment for clashing with his superiors. Their new home is shabby, and the base itself is isolated from any other mode of society. Hank will continue to insist on scientific honesty and the prioritization of human life over military interest, driving an even deeper wedge between himself and a superior officer with eyes for Carly.
Mrs. Marshall, for her part, is outraged at being transplanted from an island paradise to a Southern shithole. She gets a great series of wordless close-ups as the family drives through their new neighborhood, looking enamored with the expensive mansions decorated with white picket houses and happy kids and maids, only to grow more and more disgusted as the homes get shabbier and shabbier. If Carly’s explosion of suffocated disdain is somewhat predictable as a narrative beat, the expression of it by the character and the volume of it by the actress caught me by surprise. Richardson and Lange ensure Carly reads as something of a frightened animal lashing out at her new circumstances, even as those lashings are dangerous and symptomatic of larger, longstanding illnesses.
Of all Lange’s nominated roles, Carly Marshall is the least interested in any form of self-restraint or consideration for others, giving her an alibi to indulge in carnality and loose, tempestuous affects. I’d argue that Lange’s reactions being so much bigger than anything around her often benefits Blue Sky. She endows the film with the same sense of gratuitous danger her character so delights in, especially as plotlines of generational divide and military cover-up take on as much weight as the spousal recrimination. If you’re being incredibly generous, you might be able to pepper over some inexplicable narrative swerves or image-making by picturing Blue Sky as the kind of star vehicle Carly would’ve made if she’d become an actress like she always dreamed of.
But the baseline risk Lange provides doesn’t compensate for how uneven the performance is. Sometimes she provides real delicacy to Carly’s flashes of regret and introspection. At other moments these actions read too obviously as Carly play-acting softness without her interpreter providing fresh insights into this woman or the armor she’s wielding. By the same token, Lange’s diva theatrics are so uniquely elemental that they’re always, always watchable, yet she leans too often into flaunting her character’s impropriety for the fun of it.
Akin to Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine almost 20 years later, Lange has decided the best way through this messy script is to not sand down Carly’s edges but to play them up. Even Lange’s silences are big, which doesn’t mean they’re predictable or unaffecting. I also spent a lot of time thinking of Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer, a much greener performance that nevertheless carries a simiilar sheen of a gutsy artist who's decided that committing to the highwire bit she's asked to play is gonna have to be an adequate substitute for deeper character work. Lange is even more resourceful than Taylor here, and even better at magnetizing her film that Blanchett is, but it does mean that as riveting as it is, she never feels as measured as her best work.
I did not expect this tribute to an actor I idolize to be about the most uneven of her films I've watched, but sometimes picking apart a performer's mid-tier work helps make you appreciate those alchemical elements that make them unique. And even if Blue Sky is mid-tier Lange, that's still one hell of an entertaining turn. So, in the spirit of sharing praise and happy birthdays, go read Michael Koresky's Films of Endearment and appreciate how lovingly he documents the barnstorming strengths of Country and of Lange's performance, along with a larger homage to her starmaking work in the 1980's. Go read Nick Davis on Lange's pre-Ryan Murphy career and on the Herculean feat of actressing she undertakes in Frances. Hell, go watch Frances! Or Tootsie, Sweet Dreams, Cape Fear, Masked & Anonymous, In Secret, AHS, or whatever film starring the one-and-only Jessica Lange that holds closest to your heart. We love a celebration, and what better excuse is there than a command from someone on the internet?