Movie Review : Powerful, Emotional ‘Blue Sky’ Loses Its Way at Finish : An infatuation with melodrama pushes Tony Richardson’s last film away from its many strengths.

“Blue Sky” is a confounding film, simultaneously silk purse and sow’s ear. What begins as a compelling and beautifully acted portrait of a complex adult relationship ends with a B-picture finale about military secrecy, a turn of events as baffling as it sounds.

The last picture of Tony Richardson’s career, completed almost simultaneously with his death in 1991 but not released until now, “Blue Sky” is a throwback to the emotional intensity of the director’s early British work (strong films like “Look Back in Anger” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”) with the added advantage of a lifetime’s accumulated filmmaking skill.

Richardson also had the benefit of Jessica Lange and Tommy Lee Jones as Carly and Maj. Hank Marshall, a military couple enmeshed in a still-passionate but agonizing 18-year marriage. Though Lange and Jones are Oscar winners who have not lacked for strong parts, the combination of their ease with each other and their obvious trust in Richardson has resulted in intense, volatile performances that have to be considered among the strongest in both their careers.

Rama Laurie Stagner, whose story “Blue Sky” is taken from (and who wrote the script with Arlene Sarner & Jerry Leichtling), based the work on her parents’ relationship, and much of that verisimilitude clings to this project. Its depiction of a family fighting for life, of two people whose ragged frailties make them all the more sympathetic, is enough to make most of “Blue Sky” play like a textbook on how to convey emotional truth on screen.

It’s Carly who’s seen first, and as the film’s passion flower opening image blends into a credit sequence of a red-nail-polished hand turning the pages of glamorous movie magazines the type of woman she is seems clear.

But Southern-bred Carly, as is shown in the scene of her exuberantly sunbathing topless on a beach in Hawaii while her husband and some of the men in his command helicopter pass, is too tempestuous to be just a type. A full-bore exhibitionist and tale-spinner who finds reality much too confining, she has a hunger for experience the more controlling major admires even though there are hints it has led her astray.

“Blue Sky” is set in 1962, and Maj. Marshall, a military scientist involved in detecting radiation from U.S. nuclear testing, has a habit of speaking his mind to his superiors in a way that is not always appreciated. One result is a transfer for the Marshalls and their daughters from the paradise of Hawaii to the dismal backwater of Ft. Matthews, Ala.

As the drabness of their new surroundings sinks in, the other side of Carly emerges. A true manic-depressive, Carly has a fragility as acute as her bravado, and her capacity for self-destruction is awesome. Lange’s highly emotional yet controlled performance as a woman in agony determined, in her husband’s words, to “take everything right over the edge” perfectly captures the pitch of this difficult character.

And as the partner who holds the family together, Jones is more sensitive and emotionally vulnerable than he’s allowed himself to be before. Love, he tells their daughters, is “an exchange of energy over time,” and just as water remains water even when it turns to vapor or even ice, he and their mother are determined to care for each other no matter what form their passions take.

But when Carly becomes a magnet for the major’s formidable commanding officer, Col. Vince Johnson (Powers Boothe), as well as a good friend to the colonel’s wife (Carrie Snodgress), the pain in Hank’s eyes deepens, and Jones’ performance carefully conveys how much being in love with an unchartable whirlwind like Carly has cost him.

“Blue Sky” handles this emotional material so well it is a shock when, with no warning to speak of, the film at the last minute abandons what it does best and concentrates its energies on an indifferent scenario involving official suppression of test data, a subplot that was probably intended to be socially relevant but isn’t.

Though at first having Maj. Marshall involved with nuclear radiation makes an interesting counterpoint to the volatility of his marital relationship, “Blue Sky’s” infatuation with melodrama pushes the least original and successful parts of the movie to the forefront and squanders hard-won believability.

Still, the acting here is so exceptional, extending down to Amy Locane and Anna Klemp as the two Marshall daughters and Chris O’Donnell as the former’s new boyfriend (and the colonel’s son), that it hurts to have to mention the down side. While “Blue Sky’s” vibrancy points up how rare that quality has become, the way everything finally falls to earth underlines the difficulty even promising projects have in staying on track all the way to the end.

* MPAA rating: PG-13. Times guidelines: It depicts an adult treatment of a volatile marriage. ‘Blue Sky’

Jessica Lange: Carly Marshall

Tommy Lee Jones: Hank Marshall

Powers Boothe: Vince Johnson

Carrie Snodgress: Vera Johnson

A Robert H. Solo production, released by Orion Pictures. Director Tony Richardson. Producer Robert H. Solo. Screenplay Rama Laurie Stagner and Arlene Sarner & Jerry Leichtling. Cinematographer Steven Yaconelli. Editor Robert K. Lambert. Music Jack Nitzche. Production design Timian Alsaker. Set decorator Leslie Rollins. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In limited release in Southern California.