Rose Byrne is incredible — and unbearable — in director Mary Bronstein’s dark dramedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.
Photo: Logan White/A24
You see the face of the little girl at the anguished nexus of Linda’s (Rose Byrne) life only once in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Throughout the rest of the movie, the unnamed child, who’s played by Delaney Quinn, is presented in fragments: a close-up of hands mangling a selection from a breakfast buffet, the curve of an ear when being spooned in bed, a tremulous voice coming from the back seat of the car. While no one mentions a diagnosis out loud, Linda’s daughter appears to be suffering from ARFID, and her refusal to eat has been persistent enough to require a stomach tube and nightly infusions of nutrients by way of a feeding pump. That’d be a difficult situation at any time, but Linda, who works as a psychotherapist, is also solo parenting while her ship-captain husband, Charles (Christian Slater), is at sea for several weeks, and the ceiling in their Long Island apartment happens to have caved in, forcing the mother and child to take refuge at a motel while waiting on repairs. The stress of these experiences warps the film’s visual style, forming an indirect distortion field that prevents us from seeing Linda’s daughter directly and turns Linda herself into a gravitational force pulling cinematographer Christopher Messina’s camera I’m not touching you close to Byrne’s face for long stretches. Some films make a point of not pulling away from their main character’s uglier moments. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, brilliantly and suffocatingly, turns its unrelenting photography into a manifestation of Linda’s self-loathing, her anxiety so intense there’s barely room for anyone else in the frame.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the long-in-coming second feature from writer-director Mary Bronstein, who got her start in 2008 with Yeast, a comedy about a toxic friendship in which she also starred. Yeast was grouped in with mumblecore because it was low budget and lo-fi and featured a young Greta Gerwig, but it had little in common spiritually with a mini-movement fueled by noncommittal conversations. Bronstein aimed instead for an abrasiveness that could feel downright hostile, and while If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a far slicker and starrier production, it manages to feel just as confrontational. A lot of that deliberate friction comes from the characterization of Linda herself, who compulsively makes her problems everyone else’s. She screams over not being allowed to double-park at her daughter’s facility, responds to sympathetic overtures from a fellow motel resident (A$AP Rocky) by yelping “Not interested!,” and books regular sessions with her colleague (a wonderfully exasperated Conan O’Brien) so she can demand he tell her what to do.
Linda is off-putting, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You also inexorably lowers you into her heightened emotional state like a too-hot bath, insisting you share in the unshakable panic that keeps her up all night, self-medicating with pot and booze that makes the situation worse. It’s impossible to separate Byrne’s performance from the way the film molds itself around her, but she is terrifyingly committed to this woman on the verge. It’s the kind of turn that gets labeled brave because it’s so unflattering, but the marvel of what Byrne accomplishes is how funny she sometimes manages to be, even as she’s also brittle and broken. She throws a fit at the indifferent front-desk clerk (Ivy Wolk) over whether it’s too late for her to purchase wine and looks increasingly bedraggled and visibly disinterested in her own clients when she drags herself to work. Linda is desperate and sad, but you have to respect how spectacularly poorly she’s handling it, whether she’s sneaking out to get high when her daughter’s asleep or bribing the little girl with an ill-advised purchase of a hamster in exchange for walking into her treatment center alone. There’s a high-wire tension to Linda’s toying with disaster, a way in which the film feels like the Uncut Gems of motherhood (Josh Safdie is actually a producer). She doesn’t wear her difficult situation with grace or stoicism; she staggers forward, shrieking about the unfairness of it all — an imbalance stemming, presumably, from the universe.
It stems, of course, from society as well, from the men in Linda’s life who offer her nothing but impatience for not being able to get things together and from her internalized suspicion that there’s something wrong with her because she’s been unable to fix her child and wasn’t able to somehow prevent the disorder from the start. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is one of two go-for-broke portraits of maternal ambivalence this fall, the other being Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. While both are outraged howls about the implicit betrayals built into the myths around motherhood, what makes them interesting is that they are fueled by a sense of injustice that goes deeper than sexism, that’s more primal and less easily articulated. (That these are films about relatively well-off white women speaks to who has been allowed to be a less-than-ideal mother onscreen — Teyana Taylor’s character in One Battle After Another, Perfidia, has been judged a lot more harshly for what seemed to me to be choices spurred in part by postpartum depression.) But they also both feel unfinished, like they’re in need of one more beat but aren’t actually sure where to go next. Which might be the point. Linda can have as many meltdowns as she likes, but she knows she still has to show up the next day.
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