CHICAGO — Every actor’s career follows its own serpentine route to a final bow. But only Alan Arkin’s career boasted an actual scene, from the 1979 comedy “The In-Laws,” of a dentist instructed by the newest and least reliable member of his extended family (Peter Falk) to “Serpentine, Shel! Serpentine!” while getting shot at by would-be assassins.
Somehow the zigzagging does the trick, because it’s a comedy. And because it’s Arkin. Among the world’s great comic minimalists, or mini-maximalists, let’s say, no one could beat him for capturing so much recognizable reality inside so much insanity, while pretending everything was perfectly normal.
With Arkin, you didn’t wait for payoffs built on escalating or sudden hysteria, the way you did with Gene Wilder, his fellow comic genius. Who better to play the increasingly worried sounding board for John Cusack’s hit man in “Grosse Pointe Blank”? That 1997 comedy is a triumph of beautifully complementary casting. Two deadpans with a single thought: How can I make the other guy understand what I’m going through?
