In Memoriam: Donald Sutherland

Donald Sutherland was too recognizable to be a That Guy. You can’t have starred in “M*A*S*H” and “The Hunger Games” with all manner of memorable movies in-between and be considered a That Guy. A Canadian, he helped carry the Olympic flag at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver; the world knew Donald Sutherland. And yet, he had an air reminiscent of a That Guy, nonetheless. Maybe it’s that he was never nominated for an Academy Award, an absurdity, only receiving a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2017 at age 82. Maybe it’s because despite his distinct bearing, the lanky 6’4” frame, long face, expressive eyes, and unmistakable baritone, he was also a chameleon. Maybe it’s because as he got older and received fewer leading roles, he still never stopped working, and ever the consummate professional, picked up so many paychecks with an idiosyncratic pulse. Sutherland, in fact, worked so hard for so long that I have never known a movie world without him. Until now, that is, because Donald Sutherland died on Thursday June 20, 2024, at the age of 88.

Demonstrating practicality and passion in equal measure, Sutherland majored in both engineering and drama at the University of Toronto, though the latter eventually won out, graduating and going to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art before dropping out and deciding to learn by doing. He cut his teeth on the stage, and then in television, and then found his way to Hollywood. As chance would have it, I watched one of his first credited roles in 1968’s heist movie “The Split” for the first time this year. Though it was meant to showcase Jim Brown, he was upstaged by Sutherland’s quietly charismatic menace. “Although his role is not major,” wrote Renata Adler in her New York Times review, “Donald Sutherland is remarkable.” He stood out, too, in “The Dirty Dozen,” despite playing, in his own amusing words, “one of the bottom six.” That role led to his breakthrough in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning black comedy “M*A*S*H” at the dawn of the 70s. If it foreshadowed his many counterculture roles, like “Animal House” and the weird, half-awful, half-awesome “Steelyard Blues,” Sutherland proved versatile, equally at home in thrillers like “Klute,” in horror like “Don’t Look Now,” and in traditional drama like “Ordinary People.”

Sutherland could steal a scene, as he did in “Space Cowboys” as one of four geriatric astronauts alongside Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and James Garner. In a scene on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, their hierarchy is established with how they are seated, but if Sutherland gets third chair, in his bawdy yet twinkly countenance, he emerges as first banana. He could steal a whole movie as he did with Oliver Stone’s “JFK” playing the mystery man X enlisted to deliver one epic mid-movie monologue. Sutherland had a gift for infusing his eyes, his whole face, really, with this sly good humor suggesting someone sitting on a secret he was weighing whether or not to share and this gift never manifested more than as X, spinning a conspiracy theory as campfire story. But he wasn’t just a scene stealer. In “Klute,” his square detective’s eyes are captivated by Jane Fonda’s call girl in every shot but in a way that always seems to refract the focus back on her. He did the same years later in “Pride & Prejudice” but with a paternal bent when his Mr. Benet consents for his daughter Elizabeth (Keira Knightley) to be married. Fonda won her first Oscar for that role, and Knightley received her first Oscar nomination for hers, and I like thinking of Sutherland as their Tenzing Norgay.

Sutherland’s catalogue was so extensive and varied that I really think you could ask ten different people for their favorite Sutherland performance and get ten different answers. I’ve always retained a special fondness for his turn in Robert Towne’s “Without Limits” (1998) as Bill Bowerman, the titanic Oregon track and field coach (and Nike co-founder). It’s a biopic of the running prodigy of Steve Prefontaine (Billy Crudup), and though there are numerous characters, it’s spiritually a two-hander between coach and athlete. Sutherland plays Bowerman as a gently commanding old oak and Crudup plays Prefontaine as a cocky little shit and set as it is at the end of the 60s going into the 70s, there is an undercurrent of change, or attempts at change, made plain in their constant sparring. Coach tends to always know best in movies like these, but here coach’s council lets his charge down when Prefontaine loses at the Munich Olympics. Their hashing out that race is the movie’s best scene.

“If I’d gone out faster, I might not have gotten boxed.” 

“And you blame me?” 

“Do you blame yourself? 

“That’s a constant, Pre.”

And when Sutherland says that line, he chuckles, he smiles, he infuses it with this bemused weariness of a thousand condemnations pointed right back at himself. Indeed, then Sutherland does the most incredible thing – before saying his next line, he looks away and to his right...

Well, you can see it all in there, can’t you? You can see him going over every defeat, embarrassment, failure, loss, and regret and what’s more you can see him blaming himself for all of it all over again. It’s the vision of a whole life summoned in a split-second.

Citius Altius Fortius

“This killing of Israeli athletes is an act of war. And if there’s one place war doesn’t belong.....it’s here. From seven-hundred-and-seventy-six B.C. to three-hundred-and-ninety-three A.D. your fellow Olympians laid down their arms to take part in these Games. They understood there was more honor in out-running a man than in killing him. I hope the competition will resume. And if it does, you mustn’t think that running or throwing or jumping is frivolous. The Games were once your fellow Olympians’ answer to war. Competition, not conquest. Now, they must be your answer.”

- Donald Sutherland, Without Limits

The Long Sad Look

Sports. They're just the damnedest thing, aren't they? The Nebraska Cornhuskers - long before they became "my beloved Nebraska Cornhuskers" - loss to Missouri in 1978 was a game that stayed with then head coach Tom Osborne forever. He once remarked: "It's kind of strange, but sometimes you tend to remember the losses, the really hard losses, more than the national championships." But maybe it's not strange at all. Take Steve Prefontaine, arguably the greatest American distance runner of all time. The dude hardly ever lost. He never lost a race longer than a mile in his four year career at the University of Oregon. He was a mustachioed train. Yet the race that in so many ways defined his entire cut-short career on account of his terrible death at age 24, the race that I reckon Pre fanatics remember and reference most was his dramatic, awful, glorious defeat in the 5,000 meters in the Munich Olympics. I thought about this, as I do every year, a couple weekends ago when I yet again threw "Without Limits" into the DVD player to coincide with the Prefontaine Classic.

Donald Sutherland. Great actor. No, no, no. The word "great" is too simple-minded here. Let's consult the Emotional Thesaurus. Let's say Donald Sutherland is a meritorious actor. Meritorious, of course, implies deserving of reward, except that Donald Sutherland has never won an Oscar. That's seems a little strange, though maybe not crazy, but what is crazy is that Mr. Sutherland, as my friend Alex at And So It Begins documented last month, has never even been nominated for an Oscar. Yeesh. Maybe it sticks in his craw, maybe it doesn't, but still. And while I have often heaped deserved praise on the incomparable Billy Crudup for his work in "Without Limits" as Pre himself, Sutherland is his equal as Oregon's ex-track coach (and Nike Founder) Bill Bowerman.

It's a tempestuous relationship between those two. They're ornery dudes, after all, men of Oregon - born and raised - both. And as Bowerman once remarked about his ancestors who made the perilous Oregon Trail trek: "The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way. That just leaves us, doesn't it?" Sutherland encapsulates that sentiment in his gruff speaking voice and his towering posture. Pre may be a rock star but Bowerman is the coach. The two men consistently state their intentions and exchange fire. No one waves a white flag. This is never more evident than in the first scene they share after Pre has lost that race in Munich.

Pre: "If I'd gone out faster, I might not have gotten boxed."
Bowerman: "And you blame me?"
Pre: "Do you blame yourself?"

And it's there that Sutherland begins a master class in acting. He chuckles, and it's the crustiest chuckle you've ever heard, a chuckle that finds a twenty something's idea of emotional pain amusing because he has decades on his emotional pain odometer. And he says this: "That's a constant, Pre." And as he says it, he looks away to his right.

Well, you can see it all in there, can't you? You can see every loss and failure and embarrassment and what's more you can see Bowerman blaming himself for every single one of them. It's a whole life's memory of defeat summoned in a split-second, and then he re-gathers and moves on and continues the conversational skirmish.

But those defeats have merely been brought to bear once again. They won't go anywhere. They have not been purged. They never are.

Citius Altius Fortius

"This killing of Israeli athletes is an act of war. And if there's one place war doesn't belong.....it's here. From seven-hundred-and-seventy-six B.C. to three-hundred-and-ninety-three A.D. your fellow Olympians laid down their arms to take part in these Games. They understood there was more honor in out-running a man than in killing him. l hope the competition will resume. And if it does, you must not think that running or throwing or jumping is frivolous. The Games were once your fellow Olympians' answer to war. Competition, not conquest. Now they must be your answer."

- Donald Sutherland, Without Limits