It lasts all told for one episode and then the roles are reversed. Actually TV series The Kominsky Method (2018-2021) about an elderly acting coach and his agent the best summary of the career of the actor Alan Wolf Arkin, who died this week in his hometown of Carlsbad California. Arkin died of heart problems at the age of 89.
In The Kominsky Method Arkin plays the cop. He was rarely a ‘leading man’, but one of the last character actors, as it is so nicely called.
The series opens with a scene in which actor Michael Douglas, as an acting coach (and an exaggerated version of his vain self), unfolds all kinds of simultaneously abstruse and meaningless theories about acting and then arrives late for lunch with his oldest friend Arkin. He remarks dryly: “You certainly found it difficult to choose the right scarf?” After that, it viciously continues three seasons between the two. But with that one sentence, Arkin has promoted himself from declarant to main character. It’s not just that line, of course, but the timing with which he spews it out, mean by habit, loving by habit. And how he is waiting there in that restaurant. Civilized. But watch out. This man is a universe within himself.
Cool irony
So was the role for which he became known to today’s film viewers: that of grumpy grandfather in the backseat of the canary yellow Volkswagen van that the Hoover family drove in Little Miss Sunshine (2006) crosses America so that seven-year-old Olive can compete in a beauty queen competition. He was kicked out of the old people’s home because he helped his fellow residents with a pinch of heroin from time to time. And he gives one of the best motivational speeches in movie history. It earned him an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Since Little Miss Sunshine Arkin played countless grandfathers, but they were all different. Arkin was an actor who could reveal complex and contradictory sides of a character with the casualness with which you flip through a catalogue.
That is why he is probably most praised for his tragicomic skills. He could switch lightly between heavy emotions. He always brought in a certain irony and coolness from his temperament. That was a style and had little to do with the genre of the movie, play, or series.
Eastern philosophy
Arkin played on all types of stages and screens. But he was also one of those actors who, from the moment he debuted on Broadway in New York in 1963, simply had the opportunity to play a lot. With such a long and rich career, you can only pick a few of his unforgettable roles: the frantic gunner, for example, in the satirical WWII film Catch 22 (1970); a jaded realtor in David Mamet’s razor-sharp critique of the real estate business Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), a psychiatrist who trains a hitman in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997).
Later in life he became interested in Eastern philosophy from a certain gloom that he also knew. His artistic credo is certainly inspired by this: “Many actors are better at pretending to be others than at being themselves. When I start taking my job too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be human.”