Pour one out for Homer Simpson

and all the people Donald Sutherland was

For this Fun Friday, let’s have sort of an Irish wake for the recently departed Donald Sutherland.

I know this is an unusually specific prompt, and maybe not everyone can get with it, but the stuff I’d been hearing from friends about performances they loved that I hadn’t even heard about suggests to me that even casual fans of Sutherland’s acting might have something to say about it.

It occurred to me when I heard he’d passed that I’d only seen a dozen of the shit-ton of movies he made, yet I felt as if I’d witnessed a full menu of characters. He was an unusual candidate for stardom — soulful-looking but without what people normally think of as movie-star looks, and with a mellifluous but stubbornly Canadian voice. (I still remember his car commercials from early days of stars grabbing big bucks with those, and the way he said VAUL-vo.) But he was just too good, and too charismatic, not to rise.

For one thing, Sutherland worked what he had. Talking of his voice, it’s wild to think that he never totally lost those Canuck vowels but just made them sound either regular-guy or elevated, or whatever, depending on the situation. Like in the little-seen Benefit of the Doubt in which, after 20 years in prison on a charge of killing his wife, he’s very creepily ingratiating himself with the now-grown daughter whose testimony put him away, and stands in the doorway of her room after her boyfriend’s funeral (guess what happened to him!) and gently but intensely asks, “did you want some hawt milk?” Even if you’re used to SCTV Canadian content punchlines it’s not the least bit funny.

And he really pulls it off in Casanova, my favorite Fellini film and I’m not kidding. Sutherland is as epicene and dandyish as you could want for the role, and instead of mid-Atlanticising what he does with his voice is make it self-dramatizing, veering from contemptuous frost to an impassioned throb depending on which self-representation he finds suitable.  He walks regally, even through squalor, and stares down a world that thinks of him only as a cocksman, knowing himself to be not only a great artist but also a gift to the women of the world. His delusion makes him comical and sometimes contemptible, but when, in its apotheosis, he gallantly “seduces” a celebrated mechanical sex doll, he’s pathetic and heartbreaking. (I still hear him theatrically denouncing the men he believes stuck a picture of him on a castle wall with shit: “It is unknown who supplied the fecal material. Knowing their nefarious practices, it could have been a mixture.”)

Speaking of pathos, we can swoop down from there to Day of the Locust, in which John Schlesinger just decided to go for broke with the Nathanael West freak-show and Sutherland went right along with it as Homer Simpson, the midwestern sap in California on a rest cure who gets fucked over and goes murderously berserk. (Sometimes I think if you want to explain 70s cinema in a hurry you can just show Sutherland stomping Jackie Earle Haley as the brattish would-be child star Adore until he vomits blood.) Here Sutherland does a real movie-star trick: he relinquishes his glamor and shows his gangly, gawky raw self without losing any of his charisma. Homer is annoying (he alienates everyone in the movie) but when he mourns the loss of the jezebel who pretended to like him, wheezing “she liked fun… like sunshine in my life!” it’s unbearably sad.

There’s plenty else, including that Animal House cameo which is actually pretty rich (Landis let us see a bit of the guy’s ennui. Wonder if Sutherland insisted on that?). IMDB says he had 199 acting credits. What’d you see that sticks out?