Good Morning, Vietnam

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) is about a broadcaster sent to an army radio station in Saigon in 1965. Adrian Cronauer is brought in to raise morale. From the moment he goes on air he does not do what the institution expects: he changes the playlist, does impressions, and piles joke on joke. The soldiers love it and his superiors look for a way to switch the microphone off. The real issue is the news. Everything read on air goes through censorship, and Cronauer cannot report a bombing he witnessed himself. That is the best scene in the film: a man unable to broadcast the thing he saw. Robin Williams's broadcast sections are almost entirely improvised. Barry Levinson set the camera running and let him go, shooting the sequences many times over; the best were chosen in the edit. That improvisation brought Williams a best actor nomination. The second half changes register. The comedy withdraws and the war comes in; a bar is bombed and Cronauer learns who the young Vietnamese men he befriended really are. There was a real Adrian Cronauer who really did broadcast in Saigon. But the film changed him considerably; the real Cronauer said he was nothing like that rebellious and would have been court martialled if he had been. The soundtrack comes from recordings of the period, and the use of one Louis Armstrong song took on a life of its own. It runs 121 minutes. Good for: wartime drama, improvised comedy, and Robin Williams. Less good for: the two registers do not fully merge and the romantic strand is weak.