Little Mister Sunshine

 Sometimes I feel like I am performing this mild public service for my wife when I write about the passing of this or that celebrity. Other times, I feel like I am reaching back into my past to connect with the spirits that moved me, recently or once upon a time. This would be one of the latter. 

Alan Arkin died this past week, leaving behind not just a massive body of work, but a hole in my life where Alan Arkin used to be. That perpetually perplexed and almost always put off man, whose presence in most any film brightened my day for watching it. 

More than anything else, I will take this with me: Serpentine! In the 1979 film The In-Laws, Alan played suburban dentist whose daughter is about to get married to the son of a CIA agent. The ensuing action and adventure is almost too  much for Alan, who learns how to stay alive on a trip that takes him way out of his comfort zone. 

There are plenty of other roles and moments assigned to my Arkin file. The creepy knife weilding psycho whop terrorizes a blind Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. One half of the buddy cop movie Freebie and the Bean. Before Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. He was the bewildered bombadier Yossarian in Catch-22. He was even Inspector Clouseau once when Peter Sellers tired of the role. 

After a career that spanned decades, he was finally honored with an Oscar for his part as the uncle in Little Miss Sunshine. He worked a little blue, but provided that cranky spark for which he was known. He continued to work in film for another sixteen years after that, right up until his heart finally gave out at the age of eighty-nine. 

With so many roles and films to choose from, it's hard to pick a favorite, but after the Serpentine bit, I will always have a special place in my heart for Mister Arkin's turn as John Cusack's therapist in Grosse Pointe Blank. Committed to his patient, but filled with anxiety, he keeps this assassin walking a path that will take him to turning over new leaf. 

Nearly sixty years of stomping on the celluloid Terra, but always in a serpentine motion. Alan Arkin will be missed. Aloha, Alan.