Donald Sutherland, R.I.P.

The Toronto Globe and Mail gets it right about Sutherland's role in the film JFK:

And this is all before Sutherland embraced what would become his sincerely sinister era, playing villains so engaging that you couldn’t help but end up siding with them just a little. Consider his friendly spook in Oliver Stone’s JFK – no other performer could have delivered such a ridiculously paranoid monologue of conspiratorial Coles Notes and make them sound even slightly plausible. He could shoot a stare as cold as ice, directly piercing audiences’ hearts, such as in Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak, an excellent experiment in fear-mongering. And he managed to reach into the nightmares of an entirely new generation with his performance as the cruel fascist manipulating the gladiatorial contests of The Hunger Games.

What a great phrase -- "a ridiculously paranoid monologue of conspiratorial Coles Notes ..."

Hertz also published an article about Sutherland's greatest scenes, and he includes JFK:

Growing up, I’m not sure there was another young adult in all of Canada more obsessed with Oliver Stone’s JFK than me. I can’t recall exactly how I was introduced to the 1991 film — I had the habit of going to my local Blockbuster and grabbing any release whose length required two VHS tapes — but very quickly I fell down Stone’s rabbit hole. So much so that I coerced my father to drive me to a JFK conspiracy theorist talk at the local Chapters, and even shell out for two tickets to hear Stone himself give a guest lecture at the University of Toronto. And I cannot help but think so much of my attraction to Stone’s film was in part owing to Sutherland’s masterful appearance mid-film, in which the actor, playing “Mr. X,” is asked by his director to deliver a 10-minute-plus monologue detailing the entire history of the U.S. military-industrial complex. It is such a ridiculously paranoid role of conspiratorial fever dreams, but through his usual poise and dignified presence, Sutherland sells it with the slick confidence of a master manipulator.

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