
The song popularized by Louis Armstrong ‘What a Wonderful World’ is a beautiful song that celebrates nature: Trees of green, red roses too, they bloom for me and you; Skies of blue, clouds of white, bright blessed day and dark sacred nights. Nature is marveled at and I’m sure you have experienced that and felt the same wonder. It’s a song that also celebrates friendship, and above all it celebrates falling in love: Friends shake hands saying, ‘How do you do?’ What they are really saying is, ‘I love you.’ It’s a great song about the fantastic gifts of life: creation; friendship; falling in love. But as we saw from the pictures, there is something wrong with our world.
But in Mitch Markowitz’s film Good Morning Vietnam while the song says one thing the pictures say another. As we are told ‘the roses bloom for me and for you’, we see a bomb going off. As we hear the words ‘the colours of the rainbow so pretty in the sky’, we see protesters being beaten. And, most poignant of all, the chorus of ‘I say to myself, what a wonderful world’ is accompanied by images of the little child’s sandal. That’s the world we live in. It should be so good and yet there is something desperately wrong. The film’s artistry is very clever because it shows us that the world is not the place it ought to be. It should be a wonderful world, but all too often it is spoilt by people. The film is summed up by the Vietnamese girl with whom Robin Williams has fallen in love.