Source: The Conversation – UK – By Laura O’Flanagan, PhD Candidate, School of English, Dublin City University
Director Mary Bronstein’s discomfiting new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is a compelling watch. Centred by a career-defining performance from Rose Byrne that has gained her an Oscar nomination, the film is a dark treatise on motherhood, swirling in blame, shame and an increasing sense of dread.
Byrne’s Linda is an exhausted and perpetually worried mother, wife and therapist harbouring both guilt and resentment. She is looking after her seriously sick child, who is almost never shown on screen. Linda is not a woman unravelling, she is unravelled – the remnant pieces disintegrating in front of our eyes through a series of escalating awful events.
Her life is literally falling apart: her daughter’s health is not improving, her work as a therapist is difficult and unfulfilling, her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work and barely interested. Then the ceiling of her apartment falls in.
Byrne is magnetic, searingly raw and unfiltered as a woman pushed to the edge. She is ferociously committed to her performance and has never been better onscreen. She moves with emotional precision, careful and considered, never slipping into cliched melodrama or histrionics.
Throughout the film, Byrne is shown in close-up – in all interactions, the camera is focused on her. In this way, the director brings the audience fully into Linda’s mind and point of view. Every unsympathetic dismissal (even from her own therapist, a grim-faced Conan O’Brien), every moment of blame, is keenly felt and depicted without apology.
Linda’s daughter’s doctor (played by Bronstein) has an impatient callousness which compounds the anxiety. Linda’s daughter is around ten years of age, and portrayed primarily through sound off-screen: grating, insistent and impossible to ignore. Her cries, her arguing, her screams and the beeping of her medical equipment create an uncomfortable and urgent soundtrack, which draws viewers even further into Linda’s intense and stressful reality.
Even welcome moments of levity are tinged with a darkness which restricts their impact. Linda’s therapy clients provide some light relief, but a pervading heaviness hangs in the air, particularly in disturbing scenes with Caroline (an excellent Danielle Macdonald). An anxious, needy and demanding patient, Caroline is also a struggling mother, like Linda.
An unfortunate incident with a hamster builds in dark hilarity, only for the laughter to curdle. Linda becomes locked in a battle of wills with a motel receptionist (Ivy Wolk), whose jobsworth insistence around the sale of wine is exaggeratedly maddening – and leads to Linda’s unlikely connection with a charming motel employee, James (A$AP Rocky in fine form).
This is an urgent, important and admirable cinematic portrayal of motherhood, but I can’t say I enjoyed watching it. Its treatment of maternal anger and ambivalence without softening the edges is confronting and somewhat triggering. But this may have been Bronstein’s directorial intention.
Modern cinema has become less interested in saccharine, idealised depictions of mothers and more concerned with their inner lives, however messy. Recent films such as Nightbitch and Die My Love forego maternal sentimentality and tidy redemption, instead showing mothers as complex and imperfect human characters raising children.
Based on some of Bronstein’s real-life experiences of caring for a sick child, If I Had Legs I’d Kick you shines a glaring and uncomfortable light on aspects of motherhood which are usually kept in the shadows: the thankless drudgery, the loss of selfhood, and all the resentment and resultant guilt these carry with them.
Linda is drowning in despair and shame, unable to find help, empathy or even a break. Her experience of motherhood is harrowing and messy, and the film dares its audience to confront the strain both of looking after a sick child and of fierce maternal attachment.
Like its depiction of Linda’s life, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is imperfect and at times overwhelmingly chaotic. At its core, this is a dark and unsettling film which will start conversations about the complexities of motherhood. Byrne’s unrelenting and towering central performance makes it a compelling and unforgettable watch, albeit a challenging one.
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Laura O’Flanagan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: Rose Byrne is raw, magnetic and unfiltered as a woman in crisis – https://theconversation.com/if-i-had-legs-id-kick-you-rose-byrne-is-raw-magnetic-and-unfiltered-as-a-woman-in-crisis-275990