Remembering Donald Sutherland, a Chameleon and the Most Human of Stars

It may now be hard to imagine, but in 1970, Donald Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, was the coolest movie star on the planet. The moment I saw him in “MASH,” I knew he was the person I wanted to be, the same way that I wanted to be Mick Jagger or Steve McQueen. In 1970, Pacino and De Niro hadn’t happened yet. You could say that Robert Redford and Paul Newman, in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), had achieved the quintessence of a kind of studio-system cool, inventing the buddy movie.

But in “MASH,” Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, as “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper John” McIntyre, were buddies of a headier, more intoxicating kind. They were so cool that they seemed to stand outside the system, studio or otherwise. They devised their own rules, which came down to this: If you could make fun of the world and everything in it, you could achieve the hipster version of a state of grace. Robert Altman’s movie was a poker-faced counterculture comedy, with the Korean War standing in for Vietnam, and these two deadpan joker scoundrels stood right in the middle of it, going off on…everything.

The beauty of it was, they never got riled. The ’60s, which had just ended, were full of people shouting, ranting, protesting, speaking self-righteous truth to power. In “MASH,” Hawkeye and Trapper John didn’t shout. They chortled, mostly to themselves. They smirked truth to power. The two actors were playing surgeons, which…