Madman At The Mike

Rating: 6/10 (23 August 2010)

At the center of "Good Morning, Vietnam" is a man sitting at a radio microphone, performing a balancing act of uncommon delicacy as he teeters on the edge of madness and delivers the biggest laughs in the movie.
That would be Bruno Kirby playing an obtusely square Army lieutenant who thinks he is actually a comedy cut-up. At one point in the film he gets his chance, after the much more successful DJ Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) has been pulled off the air for reading censored copy. Watching Kirby's Hauk character bug out when the other people at Armed Forces Radio Saigon beg him not to go on with his lame array of bizarre puns and French accents kills me every time I see this film.
"If it's not funny, why did I hear you laughing when you typed it?" Hauk demands of his aide.
"I was thinking of something else."
"Good Morning, Vietnam" is Williams' movie, of course, and most of the attention is on him. It's his best film for distilling the essence of Williams' comedy in cinematic form, basically giving him a mike and letting him rip. Williams' material isn't his sharpest, but it has the feeling of being off-the-cuff (probably was a lot of the time) and for the most part is very specific to the time and place of the film, Saigon in 1965.
"Say, Mr. President, why did you name your daughter 'Lynda Byrd'?" "If I named her 'Lynda Dog' that would be too cruel."
The film does best when it sticks to the radio station, with Hauk whining about not being saluted while Cronauer develops his on-air persona to the approval of the U.S. troops, then still in build-up mode. The scenes with the other radio guys (including Forest Whitaker, Robert Wuhl, Floyd Vivino, and Richard Portnow as the affable but deadly-dull jock Dan "The Man" Levitan) have an energy and authenticity that sell the realistic comedy director Barry Levinson is after.
But like too many 1980s films, "Good Morning, Vietnam" suffers from an attempt to inject excitement and romance in crassly overt ways. So we have scenes where Cronauer woos a Vietnamese girl, befriends her brother, and tangles with the hard-case sergeant-major Dickerson (J. T. Walsh), whose homicidal hostility is neither developed nor well-explained. All this seems at the heart of the film's message, about the wrongness and destructiveness of war in general and this war in particular, yet the film doesn't need them.
Proof of that comes in one scene where Cronauer, during a down moment, is pressed into delivering an impromptu stand-up for a bunch of troops about to ride into heavy battle. They laugh, and smile, and cheer, and in their nervous eyes and Williams' desperation to keep them entertained, you get about as strong an anti-war statement as you'd ever want to make.
Too much of "Good Morning, Vietnam" is burdened by the other stuff for me to recommend it too heartily. But if you're a Robin Williams fan - or even more, a Bruno Kirby fan - who hasn't seen this film, you really want to.