To say that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a revelation of Rose Byrne sounds somewhat incorrect considering she has been a respected actress for over two decades. While many of her previous performances have been noteworthy however, Mary Bronstein’s psychological drama in which she plays a troubled mother overcome with her daughter’s mysterious illness and the unbearable weight of the day to day, feels different, a role in which she is able to finally spread her wings (though, ironically, this is the very thing she is unable to do in character). The film itself is a real tour de force (for want of a better expression), a complex examination of one of the biggest taboos associated with motherhood, complete with excellent supporting cast and anxiety-inducing visuals. But it is Byrne that dominates the screen, tired, baggy-eyed and always wishing for more.
Linda is a stressed psychotherapist and mother to a young daughter with a feeding disorder, necessitating a supplemental feeding tube and participation in a hospital program that Linda drops her off at every day. Between tense phone calls to her husband, who is away as a ship captain, and angsty drop-in sessions with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), who has the office next to hers, Linda is forced out of her home and into a dingy motel when a leak results in a massive hole in the ceiling of her bedroom. Displaced, feeding on junk food, weed and wine from the motel’s convenience shop, where she meets snarky clerk Diana (Ivy Wolk) and superintendent James (A$AP Rocky), Linda’s world progressively descends into chaos as she loses control over herself and her daughter’s illness.
Bronstein’s drama is a two hour drug-fuelled nightmare, peppered with supernatural hallucinations and panicky car rides. Cinematographer Christopher Messina never lets up on Linda, whose face makes up seventy percent of screen time in tight, agonising close ups of her worried face. While her therapist and James, as well as her anxious client Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), are given ample time to shine, Linda largely exists alone within her family, her daughter and husband only voices – and annoying ones at that – up until the very end of the film. It’s a real exploit in cinematography, keeping the daughter a tangible character with only shots of her ailing body, the feet swinging in the waterlogged carpet, the ear being whispered lullabies into. At the hospital, Bronstein herself plays the aggravated Dr Spring, who reminds Linda every day that she is not actively participating in her daughter’s recovery. Said participation, when she eventually makes the effort, looks like a roundtable of stressed mothers reminding themselves that their children’s illness is “not their fault”. But Linda does not see it that way – to her, her daughter’s disorder is a reminder of her complex relationship with motherhood, a motherhood she perhaps never wished for and now feels incapable of fulfilling the laws of. It is never enough, she is never enough, she says to her equally exhausted therapist, who never once smiles – chat show host O’Brien is truly exquisite here, conveying a different form of fed-upness to Linda, who is desperate and chaotic, dulled only by her evening weed sessions on the bench across from the motel. In her own sessions, she must deal with a patient who is in love with her, and of course, Caroline, who cannot leave her baby alone, convinced that there is something wrong with him, symbolising her failings as a mother. The mirroring is obvious, yet Linda cannot see it, too caught up in herself to pay attention to anything outside of the immediate. Her search for something that cannot be fulfilled only continues, a deep hole inside of her life mirrored by the gaping one in the ceiling. It’s claustrophobic and relentless, and yet there isn’t a second in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You where one wants to – or, really, can – let go.
