Before The Deluge-Robin Williams’ Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell,

Good Morning, Vietnam, starring Robin Williams, Forrest Whittaker, 1987   

Frankly before I first saw Robin Williams in Good Moring, Vietnam I was not particularly a fan of his, didn’t see what all the uproar was about as he gained a widespread audience based, I think, on his uncanny ability to improvise as he went along which showed up on the screen when the deal went down. After watching Williams’ go through his paces in the tragi-comic film (we will get to the tragic part in a second) though and learning as well that he had improvised many of the signature radio broadcasts which dot the film I found myself laughing like crazy. Laughing like crazy almost as much the second time around even though I knew where the thing was going. With Forrest Whittaker playing the straight man Private Eddie Garlick to Williams’ zany radio personality character Adrian Cronauer the thing worked like a charm. That was the funny part, the part that a 1987 audience I think would be happy to see.

Now to the tragic part, the part that Adrian got himself dragged into by his friendship with a young Vietnamese man whom he was trying to get close to so that he could in turn get close to his beautiful sister. As it turned out, not surprisingly, with what we later painfully found out after a decade of in your face war was that the young man was a Vietnamese patriot meaning a National Liberation Front fighter, an “enemy” who used Adrian as cover for his actions against the then beginning to burgeon American military presence in Vietnam which would not end until those graphic scenes of helicopters taking fleeing Vietnamese and Americans off of the American Embassy in April 1975. But in 1965 all was fresh so to speak as even the wary GIs heading to the boondocks and other tough spots who Adrian was gathering around his broadcasts could laugh a little when he did his magic. A kind of age of innocence before the deluge. Nice juxtapositions. Nice work Robin Williams whatever else was eating you inside. Watch this one.