Cracked Actor: Donald Sutherland
Cracked Actor: Donald Sutherland
By Howard Hampton
Looking back o’er the career of unlikely leading man Donald Sutherland.
Sutherland Tales, our 8 film tribute to The Donald, screens at Metrograph from November 26.
What is Donald Sutherland’s deal? He’s been acting in movies for nearly 60 years, an eternal presence who seems ingrained in the medium itself yet feels impossible to account for. Born in Canada in 1935, trained in England, he parlayed the rangy physique of a silent-movie Lincoln and the long, unmanageable face of an Expressionist caricature into a distinct form of stardom. In some freakishly unpremeditated manner, this beautiful gargoyle attained fame as an icon of hip irreverence in M*A*S*H (1970). Like his Klute (1971) co-star and anti-war comrade Jane Fonda, Sutherland is a counterculture symbol whom over the decades has become a timeless fixture on screens everywhere. Now at 87, in a career overlapping the last decades of Lillian Gish’s and the first decades of Adam Driver’s, he has become an éminence grise whose specialty is powerful, aristocratic old lions—men who seem made of money and disdain.
It’s a remarkable, almost mystifying arc: Sutherland’s first billed film role was in the inauspicious Castle of the Living Dead (1964), well below star Christopher Lee. Then he got his break as one of The Dirty Dozen (1967), playing a natural-born head case. With a little less tenacity, timing and good fortune, it’s easy to imagine his filmography getting sidetracked in slasher pics. It’s indicative of his double-edged stature that he did get to play a monster called Attila—though a political monster—in the prestigious Bertolucci epic 1900 (1976): a cat-killing fascist who smashes a feline with his bare head, by way of imparting ideological doctrine. A funny thing happened in the interim between Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) and that blunt force trauma: he was discovered as a comedic talent. In 1970 he would lend his unwieldy frame to Kelly’s Heroes, a World War II caper where he offers comic relief to Clint Eastwood as the proto-beatnik Sgt. Oddball. M*A*S*H took up the Korean War as a stand-in for Vietnam, and Sutherland’s mordant, screwball Hawkeye Pierce was his ticket to the Big League.
Sutherland in M*A*S*H (1970)
After his seriocomic role as the director in Paul Mazursky’s scattershot Fellini homage Alex in Wonderland (also 1970), he turned mostly serious: Alan J. Pakula’s Klute had Sutherland playing the straight-arrow investigator looking for a missing person and getting dangerously involved with Fonda’s detached sex worker: testing the limits of conflicted decency on-screen, madly in love and in lust with Fonda offscreen. From there through Philip Kaufman’s stunning Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), his roles mostly fall on some kind of personality spectrum—maybe not autistic as such, but close enough for postgraduate study. (The dissociated surgeon in M*A*S*H, too, come to think of it.) Pairing with Julie Christie as grief-stricken parents in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), you see Sutherland frequently exploring currents of loss, anomie, and disintegration—almost as an allegorical test subject, as when his character is dangling from the ceiling of the church he’s restoring. Between that and the legendary elliptically edited sex scene where he and Christie grapple like tender, carnal astronauts, it’s as though he’s falling into the space between physical and abstract worlds. When the defenses come down, the irrational comes flooding in like a curse.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers elaborates on that wall of dread—people losing their sense of self, being overtaken by the impersonal and dehumanized. This is my favorite Sutherland performance, because he’s playing against his own demeanor. He makes such a natural bureaucrat (he’s a health inspector for the city of San Francisco) that his unlikely alliance with Brooke Adams against the takeover of the psychological zombies (they eat your free will) is a sportive existential romance, with life and spiritual-death stakes—and by extension, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright represent the idea that humanity itself, in all its poetry, frustration, and desire, is its own reward. When that’s snuffed out, when Sutherland’s become one of them, his final insect cry is like a “Heil Hitler” from the hive mind—as pure a frozen nightmare moment as movies have produced.
M*A*S*H worked from a sense of war as meat grinder that turns people into hamburger and discarded parts. He was able to, forgive me, operate in Altman’s theater of the profane because he had the bearing of someone who could navigate the clichés of the “war movie” and the “service comedy,” and that lent him the authority to give all that the finger, and tip over the Craft Services cart where all the expunged blood, guts, and body bags had been stored. It helped a lot that though he didn’t get along with Altman, he felt like he belonged with the ensemble—whereas Elliot Gould, good as he was, seemed like a ringer. Sutherland’s a great foil, not only for other actors but for directors. I’m sure Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) would not have succeeded as a monument to disinformation and delusion without Sutherland’s masterful deep-throat, but he doesn’t merely steal the movie: he practically whistles the conspiracy theory themes The X-Files will sample till the QAnon crows come home.
Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland in Klute (1971)
He compensates for what he lacks in overarching technique with a strong instinct for hitting the bittersweet, deep notes of believability and persuasion.
I doubt many people have seen him in Fellini’s Casanova (1976)—and I definitely don’t believe it’s a misunderstood work of art waiting to be raised up from the Venetian sea floor. But Sutherland’s performance is fascinating within its own depressive-eccentric contours: this powdered, wraith-like dandy is like if an emaciated Divine (dig that Pink Flamingos hairstyle) possessed the embittered ghost of Buster Keaton. His desolation beats that of the set decoration, drifting from scene to scene looking for mislaid passion the way a butterfly collector would for that elusive specimen he’s never set eyes upon. He’s got a fascinatingly opaque facility for submerging into a role while retaining a measure of detached watchfulness… as though catching his own reflection in a mirror or the other actor’s eyes, clocking his own affect.
Sutherland’s one constant in a crazy-quilt career is that he has always delivered passion, as required, and weakness, self-doubt, malevolence, intelligence, obtuseness. Whatever’s called for—and a little more, if there’s room—but ostentatious only on demand. (The Hunger Games lets him toy with the dastardliness, oscillating between grand paternalism and the temptation to tie his disobedient subject to the nearest railroad track.) He compensates for what he lacks in overarching technique with a strong instinct for hitting the bittersweet, deep notes of believability and persuasion. A lifetime of patient work, trial and error, led him to the point of the precise register for Mr. Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2006 Pride and Prejudice. There he mixes wisdom, diffidence, and a certain well-earned squirreliness: fatherhood at its zenith. He is supremely adaptable within his limitations (his voice isn’t the most flexible instrument, and when the Canadian tries on a Southern accent for the mysterious painter in 2019’s The Burnt Orange Heresy, an otherwise deft performance wobbles like a three-legged sheepdog).
But the line from the breakthrough roles of the thirtysomething Sutherland to his current aristocratic persona is crooked. Ordinary People (1980) might have marked some kind of inflection point, this father and husband roughly 10,000 conventional miles from Don’t Look Now. That’s reading into it—a solid role, a good paycheck, a smart career move. For the next decade, more lateral moves, then a sudden little hot streak: A Dry White Season (1989) with Brando, wearing his conscience on his sleeve; Backdraft (1991), having no conscience but having disreputable fun sparing with De Niro. And JFK. Perhaps that frames it as a comeback, but he never went away: some runs are just better than others. The arch-bourgeois father in Six Degrees of Separation (1993) would turn out be the template for his late period: “It’s not a conspiracy,” he pleads with his estranged daughter, “it’s a family.” Heads or tails, he arrives at the look of upper-crusty, ultra-privileged authority he has largely cultivated for the past 30 years with that power beard and imperial hair. Nimble, haughty, sometimes dense as a bag of Krugerrands. It would only be a matter of time until the television precursors to Succession, Dirty Sexy Money (2007-2009) and Trust (2018; where he played J. Paul Getty, as though decreed by Zeus or William Randolph Hearst).
Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)
We can cross “relatable” off his list of attributes. In sleeepwalkers (2007), Doug Aitken’s installation at the MoMA, Sutherland was projected onto the exteriors of the buildings at night, waking and making his way to work. How’s that for High Culture Drive-In, or Drive-By? Yes, he also snuck in a nice bit part in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and like everybody and her monkey, did an episode of The Simpsons, in 1996. Ah, but that last is a postscript to the more piquant fact that he had already played Homer Simpson’s namesake in the 1975 adaptation of Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. He has had a stalwart career that sounds like it was dreamed up by a young Thomas Pynchon on acid. I’m not sure there is another actor who has ever spent so much time getting into our heads and yet still has remained so enigmatic, out of reach.
At this point, you’d think he might be ready to fade away into some retrospective sunset, take a last bow or two, and contemplate his legacy from afar. Instead, the role of President Snow, silver-haired (and tongued) villain of The Hunger Games quartet (2021-2015), triggered something of a Sutherland renaissance: he is all over the place, starring as a husband passing into the haze of Alzheimer’s, being shepherded by Helen Mirren, in The Leisure Seeker (2017); and more than holding his own opposite Nicole Kidman in the high-end streaming TV melodrama The Undoing (2020). I knew he was active, but I hadn’t registered how indefatigable he is: lending freelance gravitas to sci-fi megaproductions Ad Astra (2019) and Moonfall (2022); and most recently, playing the titular owner in the Stephen King adaptation Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022). You need to check his IMDb page like the stock market—blink and he has another project going. Look, here comes the animated Ozi—Voice of the Forest, where he will portray “Albino Crocodile”: typecast again.
All strangeness and quirks aside, a bullseye proficiency is Sutherland’s lifetime calling card. Take a secondary role in Eastwood’s Space Cowboys (2001), an ensemble comedy-drama about over-the-hill astronauts roped back into one last mission. It’s a very compartmentalized script and performance, where everyone is part of a contraption where Eastwood (also starring) slyly passes the heroic baton to Tommy Lee Jones. For most of the film, Sutherland’s character is up to nothing more than comic relief, a smarter, more subtle version of the function he served in Kelly’s Heroes. But at the crucial moment, without any fanfare, he has to stand with Eastwood as a peer. It’s Donald Sutherland’s secret formula: fold in enough unconventional, mismatched elements, boil them down to a fine impasto, and by some alchemy of naked determination, two or three wrongs make the Right Stuff.
Howard Hampton is the author of Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses. He’s written for Film Comment, Artforum, and many other publications, extant and deceased.
James Garner, Tommy Lee Jones, Donald Sutherland, and Clint Eastwood in Space Cowboys (2000)