Alan Arkin
By 
The great character actor Alan Arkin died recently. This is a great tribute to his definitive performance in one of the few movies to improve upon a great stage play:
When news broke that the venerable character actor Alan Arkin had died Thursday at 89, he was remembered for roles onstage (“Enter Laughing,” his Broadway debut, for which he received a Tony Award), on the big screen (his Oscar-winning performance in “Little Miss Sunshine”) and on television (his Emmy-nominated turn on “The Kominsky Method”). But Arkin’s finest performance, and one that holds the key to his considerable gifts as both an actor and screen presence, may well be his appearance as a busted-out real estate salesman in the 1992 film adaptation of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by David Mamet. The picture came at a fallow point in Arkin’s career; much of his work in the previous decade had been in underseen comedies. He was billed fifth, behind Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Ed Harris, and it was easy to regard him, at that moment, as a comparative lightweight — until you took in his wounded, affecting performance.
“Glengarry Glen Ross” concerns the hustlers and grinders of Premiere Properties, who specialize in “investment opportunities” of Florida swampland, sold primarily to unsuspecting suburbanites under the guise of many-strings-attached prizes and ticking-clock options. Only the hotshot Ricky Roma (Pacino) is selling — or, in their preferred parlance, “closing” — any of this stuff; his fellow salesmen Dave Moss (Harris), Shelley Levene (Lemmon) and George Aaronow (Arkin) are on the verge of getting the ax.
Harris, Lemmon and Pacino all get flashy movie-star entrances; Arkin, on the other hand, is just there, first seen seated in the Premiere Properties office for a sales meeting, in which Blake (Baldwin), a smooth talker “from downtown,” informs them that they’re cutting the sales force in half, in a speech that is simultaneously crude, cruel and entirely emasculating.
Moss and Levene push back against his generalizations, accusations and abuse; Aaronow does not. He just sits there and takes it. “You think this is abuse?” Blake thunders at him. “You can’t take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?” In that delicate moment, Arkin’s face is a mask, trying to keep it together and failing; if you look close enough, into his eyes, he seems on the verge of tears. When he’s finally out of the hotshot’s sights, he lets out a long-held breath.
This sensitivity is what separates Arkin’s character, and his performance, from the varying displays of roaring machismo in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Pacino’s Roma is all bravado, much of it earned; Lemmon’s Levene and Harris’s Moss attempt the same, snapping and shouting at all who do them wrong, silkily selling to those on the other end of the phone, but their swagger seems more like bluster. Aaronow, on the other hand, is entirely vulnerable, an open wound of desperation and fear. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it, about trimming down the sales force,” he insists, the second Blake leaves, but denial soon gives way to depression. “They’re gonna bounce me out of a job,” he moans to Moss, placing the blame not on the cutthroat standards of the office or the cratering economy outside it, but himself. “Something’s wrong with me,” he insists. “I can’t close ’em.”
In this weakened state, he goes to Moss for emotional support and encouragement; Moss seizes on that need and exploits it, drawing Aaronow into an ill-advised scheme to burglarize the Premiere Properties office and steal the new leads, the good leads, the Glengarry leads. The bullish Moss baits the hook and reels the weaker man in, planting the idea and prompting further inquiry. Watch Arkin’s eyes in this sequence, the way he’s listening, how he takes in the information he’s receiving and processes it; listen closely to the way he says a line like, “Are we talking about this, or are we just talking about this,” understanding the difference between two versions of the word, and deftly conveying it to the listener. And then watch the way he registers that, merely by listening, he has become an accessory to the crime. The simplicity with which that realization comes over his face, and how he puts it across in one simple word (“Me”) is both an astonishing display of acting technique and a heart-wrenching moment of character identification.
The Aaronow?Moss dynamic is critical to the flim/play, and in some ways the roles are harder to play that the splashier roles of Roma and Levine. And Arkin more than holds his own. R.I.P.