RIP ACTOR DONALD SUTHERLAND
We just lost Donald Sutherland, a GREAT actor who was a big part of Hollywood's second Golden Age in the late '60s and '70s. Sutherland starred or co-starred in some of our most iconic, counter-culture, GREAT American films, movies like MASH and ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN and ANIMAL HOUSE. He helped bring to life Tricky Dick's paranoia and criminality during the Watergate era, with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in the lead roles of the riveting ALL THE PRESIDENTS MEN. He was the pot-smoking, arse-baring Milton poetry prof in ANIMAL HOUSE who steals the head animal's girlfriend, his student. He's the professor every undergrad has worshiped - the guy or gal who claims they're writing the great American novel deep into the night, after teaching classes, but faculty members know better... Pompous and bawdy, Sutherland is a hoot in ANIMAL HOUSE!
But the film where I love him best wasn't a cultural touchstone or goofy and gag-driven. It was a much quieter, more restrained film, set in the suburbs and directed in the '80s by actor Robert Redford: ORDINARY PEOPLE. This movie is about a grieving, upper-middle class family with so many emotions and clueless about how to share them after the drowning death of favorite son, Buck. The emotionally taut mom (the terrific Mary Tyler Moore) dismisses, even resents, her second son (Timothy Hutton) who blames himself for his brother's death, and Tyler-Moore even grows apart from her handsome husband she's loved all these years, the cool and sexy Donald Sutherland. Sutherland is the hero here, lovingly, desperately trying to knit together again his precious, fragile little family as everyone around him seems to be disintegrating. Watching Sutherland reach out to a grieving but icy Tyler-Moore and a lost Hutton who knows he'll never match the sparkle and charisma of his dead younger brother is heartbreaking. Sutherland is noble and beautiful in his scenes. He is the only one who faces his emotions. He understands his wife and son must go to the abyss, too, in order to heal. In order for them to be a family again.
I've watched this film at least 10 times over the years, and it is wonderful - a cinematic love story to kids, memories, parents and the extraordinary stuff of "just" ordinary lives.