Cinema: Motormouth In Saigon GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM

Adrian Cronauer is a military misfit. As protagonist of the first major service comedy about Viet Nam — and what sometimes seems to be the last, dead-on surreal word on the subject — he appears in Saigon in 1965 out of uniform and out of step with army manners, protocol and discipline. An irrepressibly irreverent motormouth, he is unable to fit the format of Armed Forces Radio (basically hygiene lectures and Mantovani records), where he is the new disk jockey.

Robin Williams is a movie misfit. As the decade’s reigning comic soloist, master of the improvised trip through his own weird inner space, he generally arrives onscreen bearing the burden of our heightened hopes for a divine madness. Up to now, his genius has not fit any known film format. Narrative obligations and the implicit demand that leading characters be sane, likable and consistent have always constrained him.

There is all sorts of good news about Good Morning, Vietnam, in which these two semifictional figures meet and merge. The film is the best military comedy since M*A*S*H disbanded. The reason is that it is not afraid to work the extremes. Sometimes it is on the edge of hysteria. At others it can approach the fringe of sentiment. But wherever it stands, it is surefooted and strong- minded — no easy laughs, no easy tears.

It takes nothing away from the filmmakers to say that most of the movie’s confidence derives from Williams. He obviously knows that in Cronauer he has finally found a meaty role. At last, the great monologist gets to play — a great monologist. Not that so bland a term suggests Adrian’s full commitment to outrageous verbal behavior or the lunacy of his situation. The massing of troops as the war begins to escalate implies the massing of a hip new draftee audience, kids who need, among other things, the kind of radio fare they were used to back home.

But what suits them is, as far as the authorities are concerned, off limits. There are traffic reports of water buffalo jackknifed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. There are appearances by a jungle fashion consultant, a little light in his combat boots, who advises the troops to eschew camouflage on the ground that if you are in a clash with the enemy, it is chic to clash with your surroundings too. Then there is the profoundly unintelligent intelligence officer who discerns no marijuana problem in Viet Nam because everyone has plenty of the stuff.

These hilarious turns are just Adrian’s fictional voices. He also does impressions of everyone from Walter Cronkite to Elvis Presley. In between, he keeps making these curious analogies between the position of the G.I. in Viet Nam and Dorothy in the Land of Oz. And, no, one had not observed until Adrian pointed it out just how much the voice of Richard M. Nixon resembles that of Mr. Ed.

Plenty of less clean material spews out when he is on one of his rolls. One feels compelled to credit much of this material to Williams instead of Screenwriter Mitch Markowitz. But he has created a smart and intricate context for the star. The station’s staff constitutes a sort of awkward squad of the airwaves, commanded by Lieut. Hauk (Bruno Kirby, who lifts nerdiness to a new comic plain), but anchored in patient decency by Private First Class Garlick (Forest Whitaker, who lovably redefines the straight man’s role).

But, of course, outside the comfy studios the war is sneaking ever closer. At first it is not much more than a remote rumor to these civilians in uniform, a telex clattering more and more bad news that the censors will not let them report. But soon there is terrorism in Saigon’s streets, a terrorist in Adrian’s life, even terror in his heart when a reportorial mission in the field goes awry. Both compassion and panic invade his routines. Director Barry Levinson (Diner, Tin Men) has always been good at wiring comic asides to a delay fuse, but this entire movie works on that principle. You may be out on the sidewalk before you realize that these are not just broadcasters. They represent the confused voices of all America registering shock as solid- seeming ground turns to quagmire. You may be all the way home before you realize you may have seen not just the comedy (and the comic performance) of the year, but just possibly the most insinuatingly truthful movie yet about Viet Nam.