Alan Arkin, who passed away last week of heart ailments at the age of 89, said one of my favorite lines in recent movie memory. 

In 2012, I put together a list of my favorite movie lines of the year—I was a go-getter back then—and a line from Ben Affleck's “Argo” was No. 2. In the movie, Alan Arkin plays Lester Siegel, a B-movie producer who agrees to help the CIA's Tony Mendez (Affleck) create a fake movie in order to hopefully spirit six Americans out of Iran in the midst of the hostage crisis. Anthony Lane described him as someone “so scornfully amused by Mendez’s request that he has no option but to obey it,” and at one point, he and Mendez are sharing fast food on some steps in magic-hour light and talking about life. Siegel says this:

“I was a terrible father. [Pause] It's a bullshit business. It's like coal mining: You come home to your wife and kids, you can't wash it off.”

It's a good line but the line reading is what makes it great. There's no apology in his voice, or concern about appearances, or asking for forgivness. He's past caring but still caring. Back then I wrote, “It's a mea culpa without too much culpa. ... He's describing Hollywood but he could be describing any business. They're all like that. That's why it resonates. We all carry that bullshit home.” 

But that's not the line I'm talking about.

Six years earlier, in “Little Miss Sunshine,” Arkin played Edwin Hoover, or Grandpa, a man who travels 800 miles with his absolutely dysfuctional family in a yellow van so his granddaughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), can participate in the titular contest in Redondo Beach, Calif. Are the parents fighting? I forget. But the trip includes Uncle Frank (Steve Carrell), a gay, depressive, unemployed Proust scholar, and Dwayne (Paul Dano), the wife's son from a previous marriage, who, stymied in his wish to become a fighter pilot, has taken a vow of silence and communicates only with notepad and pen. Meanwhile, Edwin, the father's father, is living with them because he got kicked out of his senior facility for snorting heroin. Yeah, it's a bit much. But it's still fun.

On the trip, stultified and fed up, Grandpa looks over at Dwayne, this doofus kid with his doofus vow, and says the following:

Can I give you some advice? Well, I'm going to give it to you anyway. I don't want you making the same mistakes I made when I was young. Dwayne? That's your name, right? Dwayne? This is the voice of experience talking. Are you listening? 

You wonder what it could be. There's so much wrong with Dwayne it could be anything.

Fuck a lot of women, Dwayne. Not just one woman. A lot of women. 

I exploded with laughter. It was so unexpected. It was also the line reading. He didn't care what other people thought but he cared enough to dispense this advice. He was past caring but still caring. In his later career, Arkin mastered that tone. 

Better: It echoes something Arkin, as Dr. Sheldon Kornpett, said nearly 30 years earlier in “The In-Laws.” You know that movie, right? If you don't, I recommend it. He's being led astray by his future in-law and possible rogue CIA agent Vince Ricardo (Peter Falk), and now they're facing a firing squad in Latin America. And with death staring at him in the face, bereft, he says something like: “I only fucked four women. And two of them were my wife.” The regret Sheldon has is the advice Edwin dispenses.

Arkin's big break came on Broadway in 1963 with “Enter Laughing,” basically playing Carl Reiner, and shortly thereafter he was nominated for a best actor Oscar for playing Lt. Rozanov in “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming” (which I have to see). Then he was terrorizing a blind Audrey Hepburn in “Wait Until Dark” before being cast as the titular “Inspector Clouseau” (following Peter Sellers), and then that great symbol of 20th century defianct impotence, Lt. Yossarian in “Catch 22.” Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere writes of Arkin, “For me he was the king of fickle neuroticism and glum irreverence for decades and decades, and for decades and decades I loved him like few others.” Amen.