Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

A lighthearted but deadly serious anti-war film, actually. This is of course a Robin Williams movie so that it is his schtick, brilliant and inspired, that makes it soar. The best of it, including the famous riff when he first gets on the air as the new Saigon DJ, is hilarious and breathtaking. There is a plot, sort of, as he goes through a rise and fall at the military radio station, but it's more about his shining moments behind the microphone than anything else.

The "else" in this movie is, however, most of the movie. That is, Williams has a serious role as an offbeat renegade in a chaotic world surrounded by a range of sensible and very insensible officers and colleagues. At the most extreme, when we see a Vietnamese village firebombed while Louis Armstrong sings "It's a Wonderful World," the sentiment is so cloying it makes you cry, and you're not sure why because you know it's just over the top manipulation. Likewise when Williams is caught in a traffic jam with other military vehicles and he warms up the soldiers by humanizing everyone and making them feel like they really should be back home. Which they should be, as we know in retrospect.

So the movie has another side that's kind of sentimental and simplistic, whatever its good pacifist intentions. Williams is a decent actor—I'm not one of those who thinks he's brilliant outside of his funny roles—and so it holds up pretty well. But the plot line keeps the movie from really finding pathos, or comedy, or warmth, or tragedy of a dramatic kind, in the scenes outside the radio station. And I think that's what it intended.

For those who don't know, it's worth adding that the main character, Adrian Cronauer, was a real person, and still is—he's a staunch Republican (Williams was not, to be sure) and an innovator in radio in Vietnam. He also co-wrote the screenplay, I assume working on the scenes that he would know best rather than the larger saccharine plot aspects. A great story, and the real Cronauer deserves credit for inspiring it, and helping it along. He was, along with most of us, "Godsmacked" when he heard the news of Williams's death.

Director Barry Levinson takes a more comedic take on the Vietnam war like other great war comedies such as MASH. Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) is the new DJ in a stiff Armed Forces Radio. Edward Garlick (Forest Whitaker) is his best friend and Lt. Steven Hauk (Bruno Kirby) is the humorless superior. Adrian's life gets more complicated as he falls for a Vietnamese girl and befriends her brother.

Robin Williams is doing his crazed manic persona. He lets his mouth run wild. Some of it work great. Some of the humor is era sensitive. How funny is a Lady Bird Johnson joke today? But how funny was it back in the 80s? Luckily, there is a story behind the crazy wise-cracking Robin Williams rants. The story works well with a good performance from the Vietnamese brother played by Tung Thanh Tran. But it is all Robin Williams and he shows that maybe he could be a great actor for the first time.

It finally hit me when I watched Good Morning Vietnam what this film reminded me of. It was the famous Preston Sturges classic, Sullivan's Travels which coincidentally as it turns out is one of my favorite films.

Both the real life Adrian Cronauer and Joel McCrea's fictional John L. Sullivan have to come to the same realization, that what they do matters a great deal. In Sullivan's Travels it's to the movie going public in general, in the case of Cronauer it's to the GIs in Vietnam stuck in a war where no one could ever know who the enemy was. A few laughs from a comic genius was necessary to get them through the day in their very cockeyed world.

Adrian Cronauer was a real life person, but if he didn't bear a resemblance to Robin Williams, he should have. One of the great comic masters of any era in entertainment, Robin Williams is given full range for his zany sense of humor to work its magic with Cronauer. He's ably abetted and assisted by the other staff members of Armed Forces Radio Forest Whitaker and Robert Wuhl. Bruno Kirby is great as the clueless lieutenant in charge and so is J.T. Walsh who represents the limits of the military mind as the sergeant major out to get Williams by hook or very dirty crook.

Williams himself doesn't understand the complexities of the Vietnam situation. That fact is brought home to him graphically when he's betrayed by his own innate decency.

Next to Williams my favorite in the cast is Noble Willingham who plays the general who has overall charge of Armed Forces Radio there. He's a tough, but compassionate military man, the exact opposite of J.T. Walsh whom he has to reign in.

Good Morning Vietnam is a frank portrayal of a war experience told with humor and irony through the eyes of Robin Williams.

Preston Sturges would have absolutely adored this film.