Character Actor #4: Alan Arkin

4.

A prolific actor, Alan Arkin's been in his share of uncomfortably bad films over the course of his forty year career, but when he's on, and the role's perfect for him - as in this past year's Little Miss Sunshine in which he played the foul-mouthed grandpa - Arkin kills.

He started out on the stage in LA and the Midwest - both as an actor and a folk singer - worked with the Second City theater in Chicago and New York, and hit Broadway in the 60s, before first making an impact in film in Norman Jewison's once-hilarious, now slightly dated satire The Russians are Coming... (in which Arkin played Lt. Rozanov, a Russian sub captain and early malapropistic forebear of Borat).

Arkin's played his share of leads (Yossarian in Catch-22, Freud in The Seven Per Cent Solution) and co-leads - one of my favorite examples of the latter being in the original, superior In-Laws, in which Arkin used his knack for playing anxiety-ridden everymen on the edge of either a breakdown or a breakthrough. He's played policemen - including in the often darkly funny Jules Pfeiffer adaptation Little Murders, which he also directed, inspectors (unexpectedly playing Clouseau in Inspector Clouseau) and detectives (Gattaca), kidnapped ambassadors (Four Days in September), and killers (a dark turn in Wait Until Dark), but more often he's graduated to - or aged into - playing more patriarchal characters. In Slums of Beverly Hills, Arkin was hilarious as Murray Abramovitz, a 65-year-old car salesman and head of a clan of a brood of three kids, a piss-poor provider but a caring father, who moves his poor kids around multiple times. Even if the character is flawed, Arkin is flawless here and his reactions are priceless.

In the multi-character film 13 Conversations About One Thing, Arkin, in a change of pace, played a sour, irritable but decent actuary named Gene with the incapacity to enjoy life. It's a much more subtle performance than we're used to from Arkin, but as good as he's ever done.

And then there's his lewd grandpa in Little Miss Sunshine, for which he may (and should) get an Oscar nomination, as Arkin chews the scenery with relish, getting laughs out of every line and look. He explains his unedited mouth thusly: "I can say what I want - I still got Nazi bullets in my ass." And we believe it. And we like it.