Robin Williams – WHAT A FEELING! (2024)

“It was an experience you could never explain in a million words.”

The sentiment is from a soldier writing a letter from Vietnam, and the indescribable experience of the war.

Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam presents the experience as refracted through the words of the soldiers over there, who poured their hearts and minds into their correspondence home. The film contains no new film footage. The images are archival, and much of the newsreel material comes out of a vast and little-seen NBC library.

The letters, actual ones from a cross-section of service people, are read (entirely offscreen) by a remarkable batch of actors that includes Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Kathleen Turner, Michael J. Fox, Sean Penn, Robin Williams, and Eric Roberts. The readings share time on the soundtrack with the music of the era.

Thanks to the heavy examination that Vietnam has undergone in the movies and on television in recent years, some of these songs are getting hackneyed and should be retired from service. “Gimme Shelter” and “For What It’s Worth” are in danger of becoming Vietnam clichés. However, the recent prominence of Dan Quayle and his non-Vietnam experience certainly makes “Fortunate Son” seem more pertinent than ever.

There are a few simple-minded moments, such as Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” accompanying footage of the rainy jungle, which rather misses the figurative implications in the song. But for the most part, the songs create a delicate web with the words and the pictures. The closing song is Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” which Springsteen donated to the film not long after he spurned Chrysler’s $10 million offer to use the tune in car commercials.

The letters are, it almost goes without saying, utterly heartbreaking. The film advances chronologically, so that in the beginning there is a certain youthful joviality to the letters: “P.S. Send Kool-Aid. The water here tastes like shit!” Things darken quickly, and a terrible sense of sadness hangs over the movie.

Some sequences are simultaneously enthralling and gut-wrenching. A soldier describes a Christmas night when the troops sang “Silent Night” as rockets and mortars were fired off in strange celebration: “I believe few people have seen fireworks like this.”

One of the best marriages of words and music comes with Tim Buckley’s wistful “Once I Was”; the song’s haunting refrain, “Will you ever remember me?”, accompanies not more combat footage but a series of shots of the drawn, lost faces of soldiers at Khe Sanh.

In this simple way, Dear America director Bill Couturie manages to paint a vivid picture of the war. It’s not a deep film, but it is a potent and immediate one.

In a literal way, it allows the men and woman who were there to speak for themselves, and the eloquence they summon under impossible conditions is sometimes startling, such as the well-spoken grunt who reports a recent battle and concludes, “I desired greatly to throw down everything and sob.”

This is a documentary that appeared earlier this year on the HBO cable channel. In an unusual move, it’s also now getting a release in selected American cities; the proceeds will be donated to some Vietnam veterans associations.

First published in The Herald, September 1988

So you see these songs were tired even before Forrest Gump came along. The voice cast for this is staggering, and includes Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger from Platoon, and Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now. Good Dan Quayle zinger here, if I do say so myself. Director Couturie has done lots of documentaries and directed one fiction feature, Ed, the one with Matt LeBlanc and a baseball-playing chimp. I’d forgotten about the Kool-Aid line, which brings back a specific childhood memory of the war, that of soldiers writing exactly this kind of letter asking for Kool-Aid – but the kind with sugar already in the packet. I recall getting a shiver when I saw the film and heard the same request.

When Terry Gilliam’s Brazilwas released a few years ago, I interviewed the filmmaker in the back of a limousine speeding down the freeway to Sea-Tac Airport. I remember only two things from his freewheeling conversation. One was that he said he lived in London because he was “less unhappy” there than anywhere else.

The other was a detailed description of a fantastic effect he hoped to achieve in his next film. He had written a scene in which a horse is cleaved in half – back and front – while its rider remains undisturbed. The two halves of the horse would prance around on their own until some happy conclusion could be reached. Gilliam’s only worry was that there was, as yet, no technical means to achieve this effect.

The concept is a typical Gilliam creation. Gilliam, who started his peculiar career as the sole American member of the Monty Python troupe (he did the bizarre animation on the show) and went on to direct Time Bandits and Brazil, is a man with a strange and unique vision. Weird things pop out of his brain, just as in those cut-out cartoons of men with flip-top heads he used to make for Python.

Gilliam’s latest vision has arrived, in the form of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. His seething visual imagination is quite intact, even if that cleaved horse didn’t make it into the film. Not quite intact is the bankroll of Columbia Pictures, which ponied up the majority of the film’s budget (conservative estimates hover around $40 million).

What Columbia has paid for is a teeming, wild spectacle, not quite coherent and a bit obvious about its aims. A lot of it is eye-popping and a lot of it is stagnant. It’s a failure, finally, but with more good stuff in it than almost any filmaround.

Gilliam’s film is draped around the shoulders of Baron Munchausen (John Neville), an 18th-century nobleman who became famous as one of history’s great tellers of tall tales. The movie has him appearing in a town besieged by angry Turks, where he interrupts a bogus stage production purporting to portray his exploits. He takes over the stage and begins to tell his own stories, the true ones, of course.

These carry the good Baron from his encounter with a sheik who wants to cut off his bead (the movie’s best sequence, a self-contained dazzler), to the surface of the moon (where the King of the Moon rants endlessly, a tour-de-force cameo by Robin Williams), to the belly of a whale, where the Baron and his companions rest glumly until they realize that a pinch of snuff sometimes comes in handy.

There are incredible visions in the film. Deep inside Mount Etna, where a barbaric god (Oliver Reed) struggles to keep his band of exploited cyclops from going on strike, Venus (Uma Thurman) emerges, Botticelli-like, from a half-shell. The Baron, hoping to get a glimpse behind the Turkish battle lines, grabs hold of a cannonball and rides it casually over the fields.

Amazing stuff. But Gilliam is not the storyteller the Baron is. His film is off rhythm; it lurches in and out of motion. And as witty as much of the film is, Gilliam’s satire is sometimes as subtle as a club. It seems one end of this horse doesn’t really know what the other end is doing. But it’s always interesting to watch.

First published in the Herald, March 1988

In the years since this movie I had forgotten that the bisected horse did not make it into the film; my memory of Gilliam’s story must be so vivid that I thought I’d actually seen the image in the movie. Obviously, there are sentences in this review that apply just as well to Gilliam’s latest (as I write), The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I suppose they constitute the conventional wisdom about Gilliam at this point, which makes me think I must be missing something. Anyway, his shtick in Don Quixote was at least refreshing for how out-of-step it is compared to the cinema of today, so maybe there’s something to be said for sticking to your own flawed process.

The hero of Good Morning, Vietnam, Armed Forces Radio disc jockey Adrian Cronauer, first sets down in the bustling metropolis of Saigon in 1965. He takes one look around the hot, dusty city and exclaims, “I feel like a fox in a chicken coop!”

The Vietnam “police action” is just about to escalate, and Cronauer is just about to fire the morale of the American troops, and exasperate his military superiors, with his manic on-the-air patter and his scorching musical selections. Mantovani and Lawrence Welk are out; James Brown is very, very in.

So Cronauer truly is a fox in a chicken coop. But that analogy also applies to the actor who plays Cronauer, Robin Williams. Williams, of course, is the hyperactive human comedy synthesizer, a guy who can take any combination of unrelated ideas and build a 15-minute routine around them.

Playing this free-form disc jockey gives Williams the long leash he has always craved in movies. And director Barry Levinson, who has encouraged spirited improvisation in his other films (especially Diner and Tin Men), allows Williams the showcase.

William’s ozone-level raps range from the ominous visual comparison of Ho Chi Minh and Colonel Sanders (“The same person? You be the judge!”) to an ear-splitting impression of Ethel Merman jamming Soviet radar, which might segue into a variation on a Roger Miller song: “Da Nang me, Da Nang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me….”

The on-air routines are brilliant, and often to the thematic point. But at some stage, Good Morning, Vietnam has to build a movie to support this material. Naturally enough, Levinson and screenwriter Mitch Markowitz (who based the script very loosely on the real Cronauer’s experiences) play off the comedy of the radio show with the country’s increasing sense of chaos and despair.

Cronauer’s friendships with a beautiful Vietnamese woman (Chintara Sukapatana) and her brother (Tung Thanh Tran) grow shaky as the city begins to rumble. After he sees a terrorist bomb destroy a popular hangout for soldiers, Cronauer’s efforts to get the story on the air are squelched by Army brass, who prefer to keep the news positive.

Back at the radio station, the ensemble work is excellent—Williams isn’t the whole show—with deft performances by Forest Whitaker, Richard Portnow, and Richard Edson. And Levinson shrewdly uses two humorless officers (Bruno Kirby and J.T. Walsh) as unbendable foils for Cronauer’s wildness.

While much of the movie, comedic and otherwise, is affecting, the center somehow keeps slipping away. The film is really a collection of sketches, without a powerful unifying idea; Cronauer’s habit of getting into skirmishes isn’t a strong enough narrative device to do justice to the subject matter. Good Morning, Vietnam is never as penetrating as it clearly intends to be.

First published in the Herald, December 1987

Even at the time, people were talking about how the movies had finally found a role that tapped the peculiar talent of Robin Williams; the curious thing is, how infrequently the movies found similar sorts of things in which he could really cut loose. Despite his unfettered presence, the film is not really very good.

Ever since 9:22 p.m., November 15, 1972, there has been an overriding reality in the life of an otherwise ordinary man from the small town of Taft, California. It was at that very moment, 13 years ago, that Jack (Robin Williams) dropped a last-second pass that would have given the Taft Rockets their first-ever victory over the hated Bakersfield Tigers.

Instead, Jack muffed the catch, Bakersfield won the high school rivalry again, and Jack was doomed to a life as The Man Who Dropped the Ball.

This is the situation for the protagonist of The Best of Times, a spunky, endearing slice-of-life comedy. As the film begins, Jack is recounting a brief history of the town of Taft, which has never seemed to win at anything. In a way, he’s like the town itself—small, unassuming, bloody but not bowed.

Jack gets it into his head that he can remove the nagging memory of that dropped ball—extricate himself from “the bowels of hell,” as he puts it—by replaying the game; that is, gathering all the now-paunchy players from the two squads and going through it all again.

But he’ll need the help of the greatest high school quarterback in the history of Taft: Reno Hightower (Kurt Russell). Reno resists, but a terrorist attack by a man dressed in a tiger suit—everyone thinks it’s a Bakersfield bad buy, but it’s actually Jack, trying to whip up enthusiasm for the game—changes Reno’s mind, and the preparations for the battle begin.

These are amusing; but at least as important to the heart of the film are the marital tribulations of Jack and Reno. Jack’s wife (Holly Palance) has thrown him out of the house because of his insistence on the replayed game. And long-standing problems have driven Reno’s wife (Pamela Reed) to temporary residence at the Top Hat motel.

A sequence with the two couples coming together for a reconciliation dinner is the comic centerpiece. The wives swig wine from the bottle in anticipation, the husbands try to bolster themselves with a game plan (“Be bland, but strong—careful, but with a touch of reckless”).

The women have deliberately scheduled the dinner for a Monday night, with the attendant televised football game; the dinner is a test to see whether the boys can resist the temptation. If that that setup seems a bit familiar, the results are funny nevertheless.

It all builds up to a conclusion that is also familiar and predictable: Every person who watches this movie knows that the big rematch will come down to a single play in which Jack will either redeem himself or become the goat of all time.

The plot may strike some as formula—how many movies can we take with a big sporting event as the finale? And yet The Best of Times has a wonderful freshness; it combines humor and heartache in a beguiling combination—in scenes such as Reno’s off-key rendition of “Close to You” at his wife’s motel room door, or the touching entreaty Jack makes to his wife in the gymnasium restroom during a pregame sock-hop.

Director Roger Spottiswoode (Under Fire) has a keen sense of how people talk, and behave; and he’s well-served by his actors. Williams and Russell have nice chemistry, and Palance (currently appearing in the Seattle Rep’s The Real Thing) and Reed (The Right Stuff) are attractively unglamorous.

The Best of Times doesn’t break new ground, and it’s a decidedly self-effacing work. But it’s a tremendously agreeable movie, and very easy to enjoy.

First published in the Herald, January 29, 1986

Lovely movie. I didn’t mention its screenwriter, because like most people I didn’t know who Ron Shelton was; Bull Durham was still a couple of years in the future. But of course Shelton’s spirit is all over this film, in the best ways. As for the director, this seemed like the moment Spottiswoode was going to settle onto the A-list, which didn’t happen although he did get some high-profile jobs, including a Bond picture. He was married to Holly Palance (yes, daughter of Jack), who didn’t really stick with the movie thing. This film just radiates a good feel, and everybody’s doing top-line work; of course, it didn’t do anything at the box office.