Blue Skies.

Blue Skies, on the other hand, is complex but finally runs away from its own complexity.

At the center of this movie is the marriage of Carly and Hank Marshall, and here is how their two very smart and smartass daughters sum it up:

"He's blind and she's crazy."

"They're perfect for each other!"

That's an accurate summary but only a summary. He's an army scientist catching flak from his superiors for urging underground hydrogen testing when they would prefer it on the surface. (The time is 1960.) She's a movie magazine addict who defines herself by mimicking Bardot and other current sexpots. As long as her husband is stationed in Hawaii, she's in paradise with plenty of sun, sand, blue water, and blue sky to set off her beauty and plenty of guest NATO officers to admire it. But when Hank's stubborness gets him transferred to the mainland, Carly has to exchange blue skies for Operation Blue Skies, a nuclear project that keeps her mate shuttling between Alabama and the West Coast while wife and daughter stagnate in the land of George Wallace.

But that's only the top, bickering layer of discord. Carly is a manic-depressive, with the emphasis on manic. Her emotional binges take on various forms: adulterous flings, reckless driving, raving in public, hyper-shopping, exotic dancing. Hank has no strategy to deal with her madness, only improvised tactics, like tossing her into a swimming pool after she's heated up all the males at a military social. He can't seem to face her problem at a basic level.

And that's because he doesn't really want to. Carly is never more alluring than when she's in an early stage of an emotional bender. Her antics embarrass, maybe even terrify him, but undeniably turn him on. He can recognize her illness for what it is but can't recognize his own opportunism. Let Carly act out her dream of herself as sex goddess and Hank becomes her votary. His ministrations turn sexual and reconciliations end up in bed. But their daughters clasp each other in misery as Hank and Carly verbally lacerate each other at top volume in the next room.

This is passionate and complicated stuff, and the screenplay serves it up hot and rich for more than two-thirds of the way through the story. The dialogue is witty and concise, and the narrative goes in interesting directions.

Until it takes a fatal wrong turn. I kept wondering how the subplot concerning Hank's friction with army brass was going to dovetail with the main story of marital havoc. Well, it didn't. The political intrigue hijacks the domestic drama. In the final thirty minutes, Hank is pretty much out of the movie--dragooned into an asylum and drugged into torpor because he has been trying to foil a government cover-up of a nuclear disaster. There is a blood-freezing moment when Carly looks at her vegetableized husband and--smiles! He is the dependent one now and she can be the nurturer. But we're soon out of such Strindbergian depths as Carly zooms around trying to expose the government plot and spring her husband from the loony bin. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf has turned into The China Syndrome, and everything is tidied up in a reassuring denouement that is utterly untrue to the messy veracities that are the real substance of this movie.

That's a shame, because as long as the script fuels them, Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange give the performances of their lives. Jones's coiled strength is mesmerizing and Lange makes Carly's flights from reality both dangerous and lyrical. In fact, Lange is so convincingly self-entranced that she gave me R.D. Laing-like doubts about how beneficial psychiatric treatment would be for Carly. Would sanity diminish this woman? Under the late Tony Richardson's attentive direction, this performance, like all great acting, enforces Andre Gide's warning, "Please do not understand me too quickly."

It's just too bad that Richardson and his writers finally wanted to understand their own rich story too tidily, too comfortingly.