Having, and caring for, children is not for the faint of heart, and you don’t need to be a mom to know it. Why are they crying, and why won’t they stop? Why will they not accede to reason and logic, like normal people? Why did I have them, and is it too late to send them back? Some mothers won’t confess to having those feelings, but that doesn’t mean they’ve never had them. Being a mother is perhaps the most sanctified role in human civilization. What woman would ever want to admit she’s botching it?
Writer-director Mary Bronstein’s jagged black comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an expressive blurt of a movie, a nightmare vision fueled by all the things anxious moms don’t want to come out and say. Rose Byrne stars as Linda, a Montauk mom and therapist who’s trying to hold everything together while her husband, a cruise-ship captain, is away at sea. Chiefly, she’s struggling to care for the couple’s young daughter, who’s being treated for a mysterious and stubborn illness: she refuses to eat, which means she gets her nourishment through a feeding tube. We don’t see the child’s face until the movie’s end (she’s played by Delaney Quinn); we know her only as a whiny, demanding off-screen presence who seems to be slurping every drop of her mother’s emotional and physical energy. She screams about not wanting cheese on her pizza; she demands a hamster because she’s convinced, wrongly, that a small pet rodent will love her unconditionally; she turns the food on her plate into a mushy pile of scraps without eating any of it. This unnamed Child X is almost a negative life force, vibrating with existential anxiety that fills the airspace around her like soot—but of course her mother loves her, and desperately wants her to get better, because that’s what moms do.
Those trials alone would be enough for Linda to deal with. Then a leak above the family’s apartment opens a giant hole in the ceiling, and water gushes through. The nameless, faceless, increasingly unbearable child whines about the squishiness of the water-soaked rug under her feet and asks her mother, in plaintively manipulative tones, “Are we gonna die?” Linda hustles the two of them to a nearby motel whose only employees are a surly young goth attendant (a glowering Ivy Wolk) and a sympathetic, mildly flirty super (A$AP Rocky, laidback and breezy). Through it all, Linda fields calls from her absentee husband (we’ll later learn that his voice belongs to Christian Slater), who offers zero support beyond barking useless advice over the phone. At this point, Linda is pretty much your average frazzled mom, but her grasp of reality is unraveling, and she makes an escalating series of bad motherly choices.
At first, Linda makes tiny escapes from the motel room she shares with her sick kid to smoke weed and drink wine in the courtyard, though she does listen to her daughter’s breathing on a baby monitor. Before long she gives up on the monitor altogether, instead heading off on long walks, barely aware that she’s leaving her child unattended for way too long. She often goes back to the apartment to check on the hole in the ceiling, which her landlord has not yet repaired—it appears to be growing and changing, its edges ragged and fleshy, a hungry maw. Sometimes tiny motes of light swirl down from it, like interplanetary beings—maybe they’ve got a message for Linda, some advice, anything. She desperately needs some sort of guidance, or at least sympathy, and she tries to get it from her shrink (played, with snappish, unnervingly funny impatience, by Conan O’Brien), though not even he is interested in her litany. Meanwhile, right in the same office complex, she meets with her own patients, including Danielle Macdonald as a brand-new mother who also feels overwhelmed, but in a different way. A bundle of quivering nerves, she can’t bear to leave her infant with anyone, not even for a few minutes, though she also tells Linda that her baby never smiles. It’s a heartrending confession that makes the job of motherhood seem truly joyless. No wonder both she and Linda are drowning in it.
Bronstein cranks up the stress factor scene by scene; If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is like the mom’s version of Uncut Gems. (The director’s husband, Ronald Bronstein, has frequently collaborated with the Safdie Brothers, and Josh Safdie is credited as one of the film’s producers.) Everything Bronstein and Byrne are expressing here feels bracingly real: When Linda goes to the clinic where her daughter is being treated, a doctor there urgently assures her that her kid’s illness is in no way her fault, in a condescending tone that indicates she thinks it’s really all Linda’s fault. Bronstein herself plays the doctor, and she has said that in writing If I Had Legs, she drew from her own experience of feeling frazzled, helpless, and isolated as she saw her own child through a serious illness.
But maybe the film feels a little too lived-in. For a long stretch at the beginning, Byrne’s face is shot in such tight, disorienting closeups that it’s almost an abstraction, a Picasso-like jumble of eyelashes and pores. Eventually, we get more visual context, and a better sense of what the world around Linda is like. Still, the woolier and more surreal the film becomes, the more it invites us to zone out. As Linda, Byrne is such a sympathetic performer that we feel linked to her, tethered in a kind of unholy three-legged race. We feel terrible for her, and we completely understand why she’s falling apart. But do we really want to keep walking with her every step of the way, even as she appears to be heading right over the edge? If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.
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