Linda (Rose Byrne) is having a hard time. Wait, that’s not quite selling it enough. “A hard time” suggests this beleaguered, bewildered mother needs to overcome an obstacle or two. What Linda is dealing with is an onslaught of soul-crushing strife. Her daughter (Delany Quinn) is overly anxious, extremely high-strung, and suffers from an unidentified condition that requires her to be fed through a tube in her stomach — why yes, it does look like an umbilical cord! Her husband (Christian Slater) is more or less MIA, reduced to a hectoring voice on the phone. A therapist by trade, Linda’s clients are all in a perpetual state of crisis; one young woman in particular (Danielle McDonald) is flipping out, since she’s worried that her newborn hates her. Linda’s own therapist (Conan O’Brien), with whom she shares an office space, couldn’t care less about her issues and can barely hide his contempt for his colleague.
And then, after an especially hostile encounter with her child’s doctor and the hospital’s parking attendant, this mom-on-the-brink arrives home in time to witness the living room ceiling collapse, leaving behind flooded floors and a massive, birth-canal-like hole above her head. The disaster level has officially hit biblical proportions. Job would take one look at Linda’s life and think, “Well, thank God I don’t have it as bad as this!”
A magnum opus of maternal anxiety, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — the title cuts straight to a punch line, because who has time for the joke itself when there are so many things that need to get done? — starts off in fourth gear and never truly downshifts. It’s a portrait of modern motherhood as a nonstop panic attack, given the full dark A24 treatment; after its premiere at Sundance in January, a fellow critic characterized it as “Uncut Gems for moms,” and that’s as accurate a description of writer-director Mary Bronstein’s movie as you’re likely to hear. But this specific take on the agony and the, well, extra helping of agony that parenthood often feels like is all hers. It’s one of those movies that beautifully infuses the sensibility of its creator into every frame and, cathartic or not, leaves you extremely worried about their state of mind.
Because it’s not like the Freudian rupture that’s turned Linda’s household into the equivalent of a crime scene is her rock bottom. This is just the beginning of her bad week. She and her perpetually-freaking-out daughter relocate to a local motel, where the snotty teen clerk (Ivy Wolk) won’t sell her wine and a handyman named James (A$AP Rocky) seems to be constantly hitting on her. Or maybe he’s just the one friendly presence in a world that seems hell-bent on breaking Linda — James does comfort her kid when she leaves at night and help her score some hard drugs on the dark web, after all. He’ll also accompany this frazzled woman to her wrecked home when the contractors leave the job half-finished. This gesture of kindness does not end well.
A$AP Rocky and Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Logan White/A24
Did we mention that Linda’s client, the one with the baby, leaves her offspring in Linda’s office after a session? Or that the hamster her daughter kept begging, begging, begging Linda to get turns out to be a raging, biting terror? Or that the kid’s passive-aggressive physician — a role, we should note, played with acidic wit by the filmmaker herself — is threatening to withhold medical care if Linda won’t attend a support group she runs? The question isn’t whether Bronstein is inviting you to ride shotgun to a slow-rolling nervous breakdown already in progress, or if she’s indebted to David Lynch’s blend of pitch-black humor and hyperrealism in how she portrays her hero’s mental deterioration. (The movie feels like an answer film to his paternal nightmare Eraserhead, using the late director’s style to provide the female side of the parental equation.) It’s more: Do you want to strap in and take the downward-spiral plunge?
The answer is an enthusiastic yes. And you can credit that affirmative response to the way that Bronstein and Byrne both lock in to how the overwhelmingly absurd amount of problem-solving, personality management, and putting your own needs in a tiny locked box is part and parcel of being a mom. The Bridesmaids actor is particularly on-point here, crafting the sort of exquisitely raw, white-knuckle performance that feels so voyeuristic and personal that, if you had any decency, you’d look away. She ensures that you can’t. Some might qualify If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as a comedy, albeit one brimming with barely contained rage, while others might describe as a horror movie. Either way, it’s the kind of film that makes you want to call your own mother and apologize.
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