Blue Sky is such an ungainly mixture of politics, emotion and nostalgia that it s a wonder the movie works at all - but it does.
It s set in the late 1950s, at a time when nuclear tests were stirring up doubts and fears, and it stars Tommy Lee Jones as Major Hank Marshall, an Army career officer who is also a leading nuclear scientist. His science is sound, but his family life is a soap opera, led by his wife Carly (Jessica Lange), and two teenage daughters.
Carly is the kind of service wife who inspires the other women on the base to lock up their husbands. She pours over Life magazine reports from the Cannes film festival and then sunbathes topless on the beach and daydreams that she might have gone to Hollywood and become a Bardot or a Monroe, if things had just worked out a little differently.