Arkin still spreading 'Sunshine' at 72

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Although Alan Arkin has appeared in dozens of movies since 1957, playing everything from heartbreakingly serious ("The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter") to hilariously harried ("The In-Laws"), he said he actually felt good about being turned down for a role in the independent comedy "Little Miss Sunshine."

The character, Edwin Hoover, was a foulmouthed 80-year-old, frail and shaky from years of drug abuse and bad behavior. "It's the best rejection I ever got in my life — they thought I was too virile," said Arkin, 72, flexing his biceps and striking a muscleman pose during lunch at a Chinese restaurant here.

Even today Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, the husband-and-wife team who directed "Little Miss Sunshine," sound a bit sheepish when explaining why they passed him over at first. "We thought Alan was too young for it, in such good health," Faris said by telephone recently. Then, she recalled, after speaking with Arkin and reflecting on his body of work, she and her husband thought, "Are we crazy?"

Certainly no crazier than the middle-class clan at the center of the movie, in which an aspiring motivational speaker (Greg Kinnear) and his frazzled wife (Toni Collette) embark on a breakneck trip from Albuquerque, N.M., to Redondo Beach, Calif., to deliver their shiny-eyed young daughter, Olive (Abigail Breslin), to a kiddie beauty pageant.

Along for the ride in their sputtering Volkswagen van is the rest of her family: her suicidal uncle (Steve Carell), her Nietzsche-loving teenage brother (Paul Dano) and her leather-vested grandpa (Arkin), a retirement home refugee who enlivens the long hours between pit stops by dishing out inappropriate advice and bragging about his sexual conquests. Yet when he gazes at his tiny granddaughter, Arkin somehow conveys a desire to blanket her with unconditional love and protect her from the ugliness of the world.

Last January at the Sundance Film Festival, when Arkin saw the 1,200-seat auditorium where "Little Miss Sunshine" would be screened, he wondered if he needed to figure out how to protect himself, in this case from exaggerated expectations.

"I was nervous," he said. "It's a little movie. I thought it was going to tank."

Instead, the distribution rights were snatched up by Fox Searchlight for a record $10.5 million. The film also prompted an unusual response during the postscreening question-and-answer session. "Nobody had questions," Arkin said. "People would raise their hands and say, 'We just want to come up there and hug everybody.' The reaction was unbelievable. I've never experienced anything like that."