If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, 2025.
Written and Directed by Mary Bronstein.
Starring Rose Byrne, Delaney Quinn, Mary Bronstein, A$AP Rocky, Ivy Wolk, Mark Stolzenberg, Conan O’Brien, Manu Narayan, Danielle Macdonald, Eva Kornet, Ella Beatty, Helen Hong, Daniel Zolghadri, Josh Pais, Ronald Bronstein, Laurence Blum, Lark White, Amy Judd Lieberman, Char Sidney. Jodi Michelle Pynn, and Christian Slater.
SYNOPSIS:
With her life crashing down around her, Linda attempts to navigate her child’s mysterious illness, her absent husband, a missing person, and an increasingly hostile relationship with her therapist.
For Rose Byrne’s high-strung psychotherapist Linda, the sky is falling metaphorically and in a literal sense. She not only has a young daughter with an unspecified eating condition that requires a feeding tube in her stomach, creating a hole, until putting on a little more weight herself through solid foods, in which case the tube would be removed, with the hole instantly closing. In what is a more jolting jump scare than most modern horror movies offer, her ceiling has also caved in, leaving a gaping hole in her apartment.
And that’s not even the half of Linda’s problems in writer/director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, where the rotten luck continues over multiple months yet is tightly edited together by Lucian Johnston in such a manner where time feels as if it doesn’t exist, with the concept of life presented as a series of cliff climbs where the only thing that’s there after reaching the top is yet another one to climb.
The closest thing to a free moment for Linda comes early on when she tries to enjoy a slice of cheese off of a massacred pizza (from being dropped on the sidewalk after picking it up, which also gives you another look at how everything that could go wrong is going wrong here), with a close-up of her face mid-chew and tiny pleasure for all of two seconds before her daughter (credited as Child and impressively played by Delayney Quinn) is calling for something from another room.
One other important detail regarding the presentation of Linda’s daughter is that it’s more of a disembodied voice. Yes, there are moments where a limb or article of clothing is caught in the background or in bed as Linda puts her to sleep while also changing the feeding tube liquids, but the idea here seems to be portraying parenting as hearing a voice that never stops, because it’s a job with no breaks. Then there is the creeping thought from Linda that maybe she was never meant to be a mom. It’s also a clever way around depicting a highly ill, if otherwise generally in good spirits, child in an emotionally manipulative gaze. It’s also sticking with Linda’s perspective, not only for the towering Rose Byrne performance, which runs the gamut of facial expressions, but also to maintain the feeling that a crushing weight is on her shoulders as a woman and a mother.
Keep in mind, Linda has to work with the problems of several other patients as a psychotherapist while barely holding it together herself. The film also offers a uniquely nuanced look at therapy, with at least one of Linda’s patients coming across as excitable, seemingly living a good life, yet wasting everyone’s time. Then there is Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a mother obsessed with protecting her daughter to the point of sheer terror at the thought of leaving her child with a babysitter, having watched far too much true crime and fearing that whoever she leaves her baby with will be a murderer.
Despite Linda trying to work Caroline through some of these exaggerated thoughts into more rational thinking, there is also a fascinating juxtaposition, perhaps even a mirror, in that Linda finds herself looking at the same true crime story later, as worrying over the most unlikely scenarios is also part of being a mother.
With Linda’s demeaning husband away on a work trip (catching sports games while rudely and wrongly accusing her of having a life of rest, listening to “whiny” patients in between caring for their daughter), she and her child are staying at a nearby motel. During these nighttime scenes, it becomes evident that Linda isn’t exactly Mom of the Year, and that’s okay, because the point of this anxiety-ridden movie is the messiness and never-ending stress of parenting itself. Nevertheless, Linda has a bit of a drinking problem, which threatens to spiral into a drug problem as she makes the acquaintance of nearby cashier James (A$AP Rocky), striking a friendship.
Perhaps the real kicker in all of this is that psychoanalyst Linda has her own psychoanalyst in an unnamed coworker played by Conan O’Brien of all people, disappearing into a role that’s primarily stripped of comedy (although it would be fair to ascribe much of what happens here is nervous, nerve-racking comedy that’s not funny because of what’s happening, but more due to the amount of bad luck on display). It’s a dynamic that complicates the already complicated relationship between patients and therapists, further complicating it now with a woman refusing to take the advice she herself gives to most of her patients.
That’s possibly because what If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is getting at is that perhaps therapy isn’t always helpful if one doesn’t want to address what’s wrong with themselves first. Maybe Conan O’Brien’s psychotherapist does have valid answers, but Linda wouldn’t be able to put them to use anyway, since, in her mind, she is already a failure, and everything, including things that are impossible to be her fault, such as her daughter’s illness, is her fault. Having an unsupportive husband lacking empathy doesn’t help matters, either. Maybe most of all, Linda needs to find some way to help herself before she can ever help her daughter. Underneath all the manic energy and stress is a film that, even if every big swing doesn’t work, leaves so much to contemplate and grapple with; it’s like a hole that will never close.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder
