If I Had Legs I’d Kick You Review

Rose Byrne Gives a Career Best Performance as an Overburdened Woman Stretched Way Past Her Limits

By: Marc Kozak

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Rose Byrne Gives a Career Best Performance as an Overburdened Woman Stretched Way Past Her Limits

By: Marc Kozak

It's become a lot more common in the past few years for people to talk openly and honestly about feeling overwhelmed (which is a good thing), and seek help when they feel they are reaching their own personal breaking point. The prevalence of these conversations is still relatively new in our society; even 10 or 15 years ago, people were mostly expected to just "grin and bear it." But for a variety of reasons, much of the stigma around discussing your mental health has slowly gone away. This is probably one of the reasons that the last few years have seen an influx of movies that deal with some of the uncomfortable, unspoken truths around parenthood. We have all known for a long time how incredibly hard it is to juggle the responsibilities of raising a child with the regular responsibilities of just being an adult living in the modern world, but now it seems like we are finally ready to admit that sometimes the whole thing can make people downright angry.

We all get overwhelmed. We all get angry. We all have days where it feels like it's just too much. And sometimes, in those moments, some people are driven to do some pretty unconscionable things.

Writer/director Mary Bronstein’s "If I Had Legs I’d Kick You" is a profoundly tense and extremely uncomfortable tour of a few days in the life of a woman who is well beyond her limits, so overburdened and bereft of any support that she just lets go. The movie asks a lot of an audience, not only in spending their free time away from real-life anxieties by watching fictional anxieties, but in continuing to empathize with a woman who is easy to relate with at first, until she starts doing a bunch of really bad things. It almost plays out like a horror movie, giving life to those incredibly dark jokes that parents might make to each other when their kids are being particularly difficult. It's an experience that's emotionally resonant and physically exhausting, a bold vision masterfully realized, another in the great pantheon of movies that you can't help but admire even if you'll probably never see it more than once.

" It's a profoundly tense and extremely uncomfortable tour of a few days in the life of a woman who is well beyond her limits, so overburdened and bereft of any support that she just lets go. "

The movie immediately gets us on the side of the lead character simply by casting Rose Byrne, someone who pretty much everyone likes and wants to see do well. She plays Linda, the mother of a young girl with a mostly unexplained medical condition that requires a feeding tube and constant supervision. In another shrewd directorial move, we never see her child's face until the very end, but we hear her constantly, incessantly fretting, crying and screaming, worried that anything out of the norm is a threat to her life. Linda's husband (Christian Slater) is away on work trips for weeks at a time, calling mostly to criticize Linda about how she's handling their child and other household chores. It's a tough spot for a parent to be in, the kind of situation that can make it seem like the ceiling is caving in.

And then, to make matters worse, the ceiling literally caves in, as water damage creates a gaping hole in the middle of their house. It's just another thing that Linda doesn't have the bandwidth to deal with, so she moves her child to a nearby motel until their house can be fixed, which gets delayed thanks to unresponsive contractors (another thing for Linda's husband to call and complain about). Linda's childcare is also in danger of falling through, as the doctors blame her for her daughter's slow recovery and threaten to legally escalate the situation. But Linda can't stay with the kid all day because she has to keep getting paid at her job as a therapist, where her patients also seem to be approaching various crisis points.

Linda is doing her best to keep it together, even as she begs her own therapist and co-worker (a stone-faced Conan O’Brien, playing against type to great effect) to just tell her what to do. Alas, there is no help on the horizon. Everyone she tries to reach out to is either not around, doing their own stuff, or simply brushing her off with platitudes. People keep telling her that none of this is "her fault," one of many similar statements that Bronstein cleverly observes as completely useless and unhelpful.

Things start to slowly unravel once Linda moves to the motel, where she tries nightly to find some mode of escape, whether that's drinking a ton of wine or sampling some choice drugs from her hotel neighbor, James (A$AP Rocky). She knows she shouldn't leave her child alone for even a second, even and especially when she's sleeping, in case there's a problem or the feeding tube needs to be refilled. But she starts to wander, taking walks back to her house, staring into the dark hole in the ceiling that has taken on some kind of magical significance.

Linda's situation is paralleled by one of her patients (Danielle Macdonald), a young mother who is so overcome with fear and anxiety that she leaves her child with Linda during a session and runs away. Linda (and the audience) judges this mother, shocked that she could do such a thing. But she is too is totally without support, stuck in a relationship with a deadbeat father, unable to cope and not getting the help she needs from Linda, who is often curt and too busy herself to see that her patient is in real trouble. At one point, the woman reappears but sees Linda and runs away. Linda just lets her go, knowing full well that this woman is mentally unwell and a danger to herself. Linda is too tired, unable to fully care.

The movie's final act is Linda at rock bottom, a danger to herself, her child, and everyone around her. It's hard to watch, culminating in a shocking impromptu medical procedure that is more disturbing than most of the scenes in straight-up horror movies this year. Byrne is absolutely magnetic, particularly during Linda's descent, never allowing us to truly look away as the camera repeatedly focuses close on her face, feral and wild eyed. It's a performance that could not have been easy, and Byrne commits to it 100%.

It's a movie that will bring forth a bunch of different emotions, especially if you see yourself in one of the characters that is unable or unwilling to help. Linda's situation is one that we can at least somewhat imagine, even if we can comfort ourselves by saying that we'd never let ourselves get to the point that she did. But it's almost more uncomfortable to be confronted with the kind of everyday situations where someone is asking you for help and you don't or can't give it.

The movie ends on a somewhat hopeful note, albeit not exactly a happy one, and we're left to shuffle out of the theater, exhausted and emotionally drained, various scenes and scenarios replaying in our minds, maybe even starting to question ourselves as parents and human beings. Bronstein knows that this is a movie that will be hard for many people to stomach, but it's a brave, unflinching interrogation of what it takes to raise a child. Make sure you're ready.