Movie Review -    - Film: 'Good Morning, Vietnam' - NYTimes.com
Movie Review
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: December  23, 1987
LEAD: THE time of ''Good Morning, Vietnam'' is 1965. Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams), an Armed Forces Radio disk jockey previously stationed in Crete, lands in Saigon to breathe a little life into the local programming. Until Cronauer's arrival, the AFR Saigon station has depended largely on the music of Mantovani and Percy Faith and helpful hints on how to withdraw books from the
THE time of ''Good Morning, Vietnam'' is 1965. Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams), an Armed Forces Radio disk jockey previously stationed in Crete, lands in Saigon to breathe a little life into the local programming. Until Cronauer's arrival, the AFR Saigon station has depended largely on the music of Mantovani and Percy Faith and helpful hints on how to withdraw books from the Army's lending libraries, interrupted from time to time by sanitized newscasts.
Though behind-the-lines sabotage is on the rise, and huge numbers of additional troops are arriving daily, the programming of the Saigon station reflects a prescribed sunniness that has less to do with the increasingly grim reality of Vietnam than with that of a giant rec room for pre-teens of the 1950's. At the top of the charts in this never-never land: ''Around the World in 80 Days.''
Within several days of taking over his dawn show, Adrian Cronauer has become the biggest, most controversial personality in Vietnam. Out the window have gone Mantovani, Percy Faith, Bing Crosby and Perry Como, to be replaced by the raucous laments and urgent innuendoes of James Brown, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Wayne Fontana, among others.
Between recordings, in his on-air monologues, Adrian Cronauer floats down the stream of his own manic consciousness. He talks about sex, the drama inherent in weather forecasts in the tropics, body functions, Army regulations, politics and Richard Nixon, then the former Vice President. At frequent intervals, he conducts interviews with characters inhabiting the dark side of his brain, including an Army fashion designer who's distraught about the material used for camouflage uniforms. ''Why not plaids and stripes?'' asks the petulant designer. ''When you go into battle, clash!''
When in top form, Cronauer appears to be speaking in tongues, most of them all too familiar. At one time or another, he sends up just about every race, color, creed and sexual preference. The Army brass is upset, but his service listeners love him. Here, at last, is someone who knows the difference between a police action and a war. Reality has gained a precarious beachhead.
''Good Morning, Vietnam,'' directed by Barry Levinson (''Diner,'' ''Tin Men'') succeeds in doing something that's very rare in movies, being about a character who really is as funny as he's supposed to be to most of the people sharing the fiction with him. It's also a breakthrough for Mr. Williams, who, for the first time in movies, gets a chance to exercise his restless, full-frontal comic intelligence.
Since making his film debut in Robert Altman's ''Popeye'' seven years ago, Mr. Williams has appeared in five movies, including George Roy Hill's ''World According to Garp'' and Paul Mazursky's ''Moscow on the Hudson.'' Each film has had its endearing moments, but there was always the feeling that an oddball natural resource was being inefficiently used, as if Arnold Schwarzenegger had been asked to host ''Masterpiece Theater.''
Just how much of the fresh, cheeky Williams brilliance was going up the chimney can now be seen in ''Good Morning, Vietnam.''
The movie, which opens today at the Loew's 84th Street Sixplex and Cinema 2, is very much a star vehicle, but it's an exceptionally strong one. Mitch Markowitz's screenplay, based loosely on the experiences of a real-life Vietnam disk jockey, skids over a melodramatic subplot that would be fatal to any other movie.
Though Mr. Williams is the film's life as well as its conscience, Mr. Levinson knows how to present the star without exploiting him to a point of diminishing returns. ''Good Morning, Vietnam'' surrounds Mr. Williams with an especially strong cast of supporting actors, including two recruits from ''Tin Men.'' They are Bruno Kirby, as a polka-loving officer who longs to replace Adrian Cronauer as the station's star disk jockey (''In my heart I know I'm funny,'' he says after his first disastrous broadcast), and J. T. Walsh, as a sergeant major who's offended by Cronauer's loose ways with regulations.
Also commendable are Noble Willingham, who plays a remarkably free-thinking general, one of Cronauer's biggest fans; Forest Whitaker, as Cronauer's sidekick; Cu Ba Nguyen, as a Saigon bar-owner with a most singular sexual preference; Chintara Sukapatana, as a young Vietnamese woman whom Adrian lusts after, and Tung Thanh Tran, as her brother.
It's meant as praise for both the director and writer to say that several of the film's best sequences (aside from Mr. Williams's monologues) give every indication of having been improvised, though to what extent I've no idea. In one, Cronauer takes over an English class for Vietnamese civilians and proceeds to teach them the nuances lurking within the most commonplace American obscenities. In another, the disk jockey is suddenly confronted by his public in the persons of a truckload of soldiers heading into combat.
Mr. Levinson, who appreciates the Williams monologues as much as theater audiences will, provides them with a context that enriches their meaning without upstaging them, cross-cutting between Cronauer, broadcasting from his antiseptic radio studio, and the tormented, sometimes scenic Vietnamese countryside where his voice is being heard.
Make no mistake about it: Mr. Williams's performance, though it's full of uproarious comedy, is the work of an accomplished actor. ''Good Morning, Vietnam'' is one man's tour de force.  MAKING (AIR)WAVES - GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM, directed by Barry Levinson; written by Mitch Markowitz; director of photography, Peter Sova; edited by Stu Linder; music by Alex North; production designer, Roy Walker; produced by Mark Johnson and Larry Brezner; released by Touchstone Pictures in association with Silver Screen Partners III. At Loews 84th Street Six, at Broadway; Cinema 2, Third Avenue at 60th Street.
Running time: 120 minutes. This film is rated R.  Adrian Cronauer...Robin Williams  Edward Garlick...Forest Whitaker  Tuan...Tung Thanh Tran  Trinh...Chintara Sukapatana  Lieut. Steven Hauk...Bruno Kirby  Marty Lee Dreiwitz...Robert Wuhl  Sgt. Maj. Dickerson...J. T. Walsh  Gen. Taylor...Noble Willingham  Pvt. Abersold...Richard Edson  Phil McPherson...Juney Smith