Donald Sutherland — RIP

My first recollection of Donald Sutherland in film was in 1981’s Eye of the Needle, in which he plays an undercover Nazi who beds Kate Nelligan, the lonely wife of a paraplegic man (paralyzed during their honeymoon!) stuck on a remote Scottish island. Reading the Wiki synopsis does not excite me. Sutherland, however, had perfected the goggly-eyed froideur as well as his character wields a stiletto. He — Sutherland — looks like he’d kill Adolf Hitler with his bare hands, then sit down to eat an egg sandwich.

M.A.S.H. makes for grim viewing — I said it in 1995 and I repeat it in 2024 — but Donald Sutherland’s turn is essential to this counterculture landmark’s sardonic esprit. As Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce Jr. he was closer to the Beat era’s contained subversion than 1970’s post-hippie liberation. Between M.A.S.H. and Animal House this Canadian actor mostly eschewed humor; he used his big-eyed palooka body to lugubrious effect opposite Jane Fonda in Klute, Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now (1973), and the better-than-expected version of The Day of the Locust (1975). I have a memory of watching Fellini’s Casanova (1976), none of which involve Sutherland.

Then in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) he played the health inspector with the perm who learns that Leonard Nimoy is no less strange for being a pod person. That big ol’ body with its flagpole-length fingers earned a deserved afterlife in the film’s horrifying last scene, forever a meme, but before it he projected Everyman sympathy; when the body of Brooke Adams dissolves his arms, he lets out a sob that I can’t imagine Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, or George Segal thinking up. If only he could sob in Ordinary People! Although Redford’s directorial debut notoriously “stole” Oscars from Martin Scorsese and Raging Bull, it’s a better film and more observant about WASPy ghoulishness than period Woody Allen. Sutherland was the only one of the principals not to get an Oscar nomination despite giving the best performance as the father who can’t figure out how to express the love he genuinely feels for his boy Timothy Hutton. Call Ordinary People his second pod-person film.

In the last thirty years the voice of Simply Orange ads defined “working actor.” As an arsonist in Backdraft (1991) he made Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter look like camp with a side of chutney. He showed a talent for double takes as the art snob opposite Stockard Channing and Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation (1993). For the TV movie Path to War (2002) he was an observant, cynical Clark Clifford, the ultimate DC fixer. His Mr. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice (2005) is a gem of well-observed fussiness. A generation knows him as Cornelius Snow in The Hunger Games. I can think of only one attempt at an ungainly accent: as the Afrikaner in A Dry White Season (1989) whose ripening political consciousness surprises him and his family (he’d appear with co-star Marlon Brando in what looks like a bat-shit-crazy thing called Free Money).

But the Sutherland performance that wallops me is buried deep in the second act of JFK, Oliver Stone’s gonzo phantasmagoria whose dialogue is as thickly applied and as ersatz as Tommy Lee Jones’ gold lamé body paint. At loose ends, Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) flies to DC to meet the mysterious X. As the pair amble through the Washington Mall the former national intelligence agent, whom Stone based on spook L. Fletcher Prouty, explains in frighteningly reasonable tones how Vice President Lyndon Johnson led a coup against Camelot involving CIA, FBI, Cuban exiles (who figure in every tale of the last 70 years), the Mafia, the Know-Nothings, Whigs, anti-Masons, and every concatenation of crackpots that’s ever hated the federal government. Stone reportedly asked Sutherland to rehearse his scene as if it were a short play; Sutherland responded with a master acting class in body language. The shrug with which he delivers the line, “I knew Allen Dulles very well, I used to debrief him on many occasions at his home.” The mix of horror and admiration when explaining the firing of CIA sacred cows after the Bay of Pigs (“I can’t tell you the shock waves this sent along the corridors of power!”). Sutherland sells, as a friend on the ILX message board remarked, the pure sanity of that character; X cares just enough. We know this after he gives Garrison a steady appraising look, mentally concludes that he’s not worthy, and says with quiet irony, “I just hope you catch a break.”

X’s smirk could’ve been Sutherland’s as he bid farewell to earth. Makes sense he starred in Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” video.