JESS LIKE A WOMAN

By RICHARD CORLISS

Why can't a movie be more like a woman? How is it that Hollywood films are usually built like Arnold Schwarzenegger--big and burly, with way more muscle power than is needed? Much rarer is the notion that a film can address the subtleties of emotion, that it can have curve and contour, beauty and heart. In the '90s, alas, the Oscar category of Best Actress has become a chic, sparse ghetto. It's hard to find five films in which women have exciting, dominant roles.

So there was little surprise last week when the Academy Award went to Jessica Lange for her role as a blowsy Army wife in Blue Sky--a film made four years ago, shelved when its distributor went bankrupt, then released last year to a paltry $2.4 million box-office take. The award was a tribute not just to Lange, a six-time nominee and a winner as Supporting Actress in 1983 for Tootsie, but to the endangered species of women's movies.

"There are always fewer films for women than for men, across the board," says Lange, 45, who scooted back to her farm in central Virginia the day after her triumph. "Good scripts are as rare as hen's teeth." And for actresses in their 40s, she notes, "the opportunities are thinning out even more."

To see what she has made of her opportunities, visit a theater near you. Nearly 20 years after fighting off a big gorilla's advances in King Kong, Lange is a one-woman cottage industry. The Oscar win has brought Blue Sky back into limited release, prior to an April 18 debut in video stores. In Losing Isaiah, she stars as an adoptive mother in a custody battle. And beginning this Friday she can be seen in Rob Roy, Michael Caton-Jones' epic of a legendary Scotsman (Liam Neeson) and the woman who shared his pain and cheered him on.

There's not a lot for audiences to cheer about in Rob Roy; it's a muddy, bloody slog through 18th century agrarian politics. Lange was attracted to Alan Sharp's script ("an amazingly beautiful piece of writing"), which contains some sonorous orations and choice epithets. Lange brings that signal gift, sexual intelligence, to the role of Mary MacGregor; the light in her eyes catches fire when she stares at Neeson. But Mary is not part of the film's main conflict, between Neeson and villain Tim Roth. Despite Lange's efforts, Mary is a mature version of that macho-movie ornament, the Girl--victim, inspiration, trophy.

The trophy in Losing Isaiah, written by Naomi Foner and directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal, is a black child whose drug-addict mother (Halle Berry) dumped him in a garbage can shortly after his birth. Now he is two-and the point of contention in a tug-of-love between the mother and the family that raised him. Isaiah plays as a court case, with evidence and arguments for each side. But in movie terms, the case is stacked against Lange: next to Berry's radiant youth, she looks sere and exhausted. It is one of those dares a maturing female star likes to take: stripping off her glamour to reveal bone, sinew, despair.

All these are on display in Blue Sky. Flesh too, for Carly Marshall is a wild thing, a would-be film star, erotic and erratic. Her career-Army husband (Tommy Lee Jones, in a wonderfully implosive, sympathetic turn) doesn't know what to do but love her. She tosses confetti around; he wears it like dandruff and wonders who will clean up the mess. Toward the end, Blue Sky trots out the p.c. placards and sends Carly on horseback into a nuclear-test area. But most of the film (directed by Tony Richardson, who died of aids in 1991) has an acuity, rare in Hollywood pictures, about the heroic compromises that marriage entails and about the fragility of trust. Lange plays it high and true. It is a performance perfectly pitched in the key of shrill.

"What I felt worked best," she says, "was the complex portrayal of the relationship." As a private woman in the public eye, Lange has endured tabloid scrutiny of her complex relationships with Mikhail Baryshnikov and, for the past 12 years, playwright- actor Sam Shepard. Gossips meticulously parsed her Oscar thank-you speech for confirmation of a rumored rift with her beau, whom she didn't mention. But according to Lange's publicist, Shepard was back home playing host to an Oscar-night slumber party (including a screening of Blue Sky) for one of their children. Things with Sam are fine, Lange says briskly.

After a busy year in front of the camera, she is eager to get back to work behind it, honing her skills at black-and-white photography. And with her family "out here on the farm," she says, "it's not hard for me to get into a relaxation mode." Soon, though, Jessica Lange is bound to get a call for another strong woman's role. It's a tough job, and a rare one, but somebody's got to do it.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles