The cutest moment in film history occurs in Stanley Donen’s Charade: “I bet you don’t really need those,” says Audrey Hepburn as she snatches Cary Grant’s glasses and tries them on. Her eyes widen. “You need them,” she intones gravely.
These are the kind of moments that Sarah Michelle Gellar had in abundance in the first few seasons of Buffy, before the weight of too-literal, over-psychological drama descended on her shoulders. Tasj’s interest in “Hush” recently led me to even reappraise Season 4, in which you can still find so many shining, throwaway Gellar moments like [frowning, fumbling with leaky writing implement] “stupid pen…”. Now that’s acting. I mean it. None of the macho method crap, which is just another form of rockism.
But as the show shifted dangerously into histrionic Party of Five-isms, the increasing unlikeability and brittleness of her character, while interesting on paper, really didn’t serve Gellar well at all, and launched a fantasy within Buffy fandom that Gellar can’t act. What do you want, the prog rock guitar solo of acting? It’s like turning on your favourite punksters because they didn’t fare well as the backing band for a Hobbits on Ice arena concept show with Rick Wakeman. While the show never really revolved around Buffy (she’s rarely anyone’s favourite character), Gellar’s strengths were also the show’s structural strengths — the ditzy elegance, the economy of intonation, and the savvy, popist implication of depth, rather than its detailed and uninteresting reproduction. Here’s to Gellar.
Fine analysis of Gellar’s acting skills. Having recently rewatched the first 3 seasons on DVD, I’m totally sold on her abilities. I’m not sure I’d agree about the show’s decline, or rather, the extent thereof - but it’s certainly true that many moments in later seasons seemed emotionally frozen - and no matter how true-to-hypothetical-real-life-in-situation those moments might have been (pretty much, actually), it was harder to watch, and more static. But I’ll have to wait to seriously reassess those seasons when I get around to re-viewing them.
I guess I’m overstating the case about the show’s decline, since I think that despite what I consider to be underlying structural problems, Mutant Enemy regularly cranked out brilliant episodes. The funny thing is that I’ve watched Seasons 1-3 so often over the past few years that I’m sick of them now, and willing to give the last few seasons another chance.
I like Sarah Michelle Gellar. She is my favorite actress. I watch, “Buffy The Vampire Slayer.”