ATOM ANTSY

Jessica Lange has rarely been in a movie that matches her talent, but boy, does she know how to rise above flawed material. Luckily, in BLUE SKY (1994, Orion, PG-13, priced for rental), for which she just won her second Oscar, she has a relatively short distance to ascend.

It is the early '60s, and the U.S. Army is exploding test nuclear bombs. Major Hank Marshall (Tommy Lee Jones) is supposed to keep an eye on the fallout -- as well as on his wife, Carly, a bombshell of a different sort. Lange's Monroe-esque Carly is both weak and wanton, substantial and flyaway, desperate for admiration and a master of arousing that admiration. She can also get a job done, even one as difficult as extricating her husband from a system that intends to silence its would-be whistle-blowers.

Lange seems made to portray contradictory creatures whose anger and sadness -- and elation -- appear unmediated. In intimate, perfect-for-TV-scale relationship dramas such as this, she is emotionally tenacious and supremely smart. It is a measure of her ability to romance the lens that her costar here, a remarkably magnetic actor, seems rather undersexed. B-

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