There are multiple moments in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” where someone tells Linda (Rose Byrne) to prioritize herself.
It’s something mothers hear often. Linda’s therapist (Conan O’Brien) tells her to try and get a good night’s sleep. Her daughter’s doctor (Bronstein) warns her that before she can worry about her daughter’s health, she has to worry about her own. Linda even falls into this habit herself, telling her own patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), a woman who can barely bring herself to get more than three feet away from her newborn baby, to put herself first.
It’s easier said than done, and nobody knows this better than Linda. Her daughter (who remains unnamed and unseen throughout most of the film) is seriously ill, has to use a feeding tube at night, and seems to be inching down the road away from recovery. Her husband (Christian Slater) is away on a weeks-long work trip. To top it all off, there’s a huge hole in the ceiling of her house, insulation leaking out like guts from a gaping wound, forcing her and her daughter into a motel room for weeks on end. And, no matter how hard she tries, she can’t seem to get anyone to fix it. Any of it.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a title that evokes a feeling of complete and utter inadequacy, one that seeps through Bronstein’s remarkably assured, piercing second feature directorial effort. Through the camera and with the help of Byrne’s nerve-fraying performance (she’s always been great, but here, really solidifies her status as one of the best ranging actresses of her generation), Bronstein so thoroughly puts the audience inside of Linda’s head that it becomes a bit hard to discern between the subjective and the objective. It’s not so much that we can’t trust what’s happening to Linda, but rather that her reality is informed by her caustically harsh opinion of everything around her – including herself.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is based on an experience Bronstein had with her own child, a time when she was so stretched to the brim that a motel bathroom and some peanut butter cups felt like as much of an oasis as anywhere else. Bronstein unflinchingly dives into Linda’s world, showing how easily her opinion of herself projects onto everything and everyone around her. That idea, of the internal becoming external, is an inherently cinematic one, and in Bronstein’s hands, particularly bracing.
Linda envisions the world, including her daughter, as an extension of herself. At the same time, the world is a place completely foreign to her, a concise encapsulation of how lost Linda has become in motherhood. You never see Linda’s daughter’s face, but you do hear her and see her broken up into bits – an annoying, high-pitched yell complaining about the cheese on her pizza, or grubby little fingers stacking breakfast sausages into used jam packets. It’s difficult for Linda to see her daughter as anything but all consuming – something to be dealt with rather than something to nurture. Bronstein, with help from cinematographer Christopher Messina, effectively deploys close-ups so that we are constantly trapped in Linda’s point of view, feeling the tightness and strain in her every expression.
Linda doesn’t feel like a successful mother – who could, in this situation? – and it’s difficult to discern if the people around her also feel this way, or Linda just thinks they do. Whenever she speaks with her husband on the phone, he is dismissive at best, downright cruel at worst. But when he finally physically enters the frame, he seems helpful and understanding. But other characters don’t hold that disparity, treating her increasingly strangely throughout the film. During an intense session with her therapist, she yells, “This isn’t it! This can’t be it!” about her experience as a mother, a crushing moment that’s met with a blank stare. Anger and annoyance seem to be the only emotions her therapist feels. Later, when she asks him to tell her what to do, he gets visibly upset with her. “I know what you’re doing,” he spits out, like she should be ashamed of simply asking for help.
Linda isn’t perfect – she often leaves her child alone in the motel room. She drinks, heavily. She can be incredibly selfish and rude. But this moment between her and her therapist perfectly encapsulates the way maternal guilt can manifest. Linda feels shame – shame for needing help, shame for not being able to “fix” her daughter, shame for giving into her worst impulses on her worst days. And that shame, in Bronstein’s world, is reflected back at her in spades.
“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is intensely visceral, a movie that, for how funny it can be at times, will leave you feeling broken down and brittle by its end. There are plenty of movies about motherhood that don’t capitulate on how difficult the experience can be, but they often fall back on the idea that love can conquer the hardship. What makes “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” feel so gutting is not that the love between mother and child doesn’t exist, but that the film posits the idea that even something as strong as love has its limitations.