If I Had Legs I'd Kick You film review: Unflinching portrait of motherhood
Rose Byrne shines as a resentful mother and psychotherapist on the edge in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Emma Simmonds rates the Australian’s performance as a career high in a film that makes some bold choices
Laying the trials of motherhood bare in unflinching, unapologetic and blackly comic fashion, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the second feature from American writer-director Mary Bronstein (whose last film was the 2008 mumblecore Yeast). It’s marvellously entertaining, squirm-inducing and stylistically daring, acting as the perfect platform for courageous, career-best work from star Rose Byrne.
Byrne plays Linda, a Montauk-based psychotherapist who is single-handedly dealing with a daughter (played by Delaney Quinn) whose eating disorder has resulted in her having a feeding tube fitted. Linda’s absent ship-captain husband Charles (Christian Slater) is checking into their worsening situation by phone, with an air of permanent irritation. When the ceiling in their apartment collapses, the pair move into a skeezy motel where Linda’s mental health begins to deteriorate further; she starts drinking and smoking heavily, gobbles up junk food and befriends the motel’s dark web-surfing superintendent James (rapper and Rihanna’s other-half A$AP Rocky), with a view to scoring drugs.
Linda has a hilariously antagonistic relationship with her own therapist (former talk show host Conan O’Brien, absolutely killing it comically), who works in the same building as her and is visibly exasperated by and even downright hostile towards her. Bronstein appears as another of Linda’s adversaries, Dr Spring, who is caring for Linda’s daughter and tells parents in her support group that their children’s circumstances are not their fault, while strongly conveying to Linda that she needs to do much better. We feel how galling it is for Linda to be patronised and judged by her fellow medical professionals. Patti Cake$ star Danielle Macdonald plays one of Linda’s patients, Caroline, a new mother whose mental health crisis somewhat mirrors Linda’s own, and whose actions add to her load.
We’ve seen an escalation in depictions of messy, out-of-their-depth and resentful mothers in recent years, going back to the horrors of We Need To Talk About Kevin in 2011, with films and shows that disabuse us of those saccharine, Insta-promoted notions of perfect parenting such as Tully, Motherland and The Letdown increasingly the norm. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You also bears comparison to last year’s less successful Nightbitch, which dealt with the confidence-crushing loss of abandoning a career to raise a child, in outlandish and tonally haphazard style.
By contrast, this is a film that knows emphatically what it is, totally comfortable in its own discomfort as it shows the disproportionate domestic burden that commonly falls on women, even when both parents are working. If the scenarios depicted are sometimes extreme and the cascading nature of the catastrophes is deliberately farcical, this still seems like widely recognisable stuff.
Bronstein’s decision not to show the face of Linda’s child in their interactions is a bold, initially discombobulating one, but it pays dividends in a film that unashamedly makes this about the mother’s experience and her harried, exhausted existence, encouraging us to really see the impact on her as each fresh crisis hits.
It also takes an imaginative approach to depicting Linda’s increasingly suicidal despair. A fantastical lens is applied to the gaping, oddly inviting hole in Linda’s apartment ceiling that she becomes fixated on and that haunts her thoughts, showing it as something that she wants to crawl into, or that she is willing to swallow her up. Byrne demonstrated her dramatic prowess way back in a breakthrough role in TV’s Damages but the Australian-born star is probably best known for her superlative comedic work (in films such as Bridesmaids, Bad Neighbours and Spy, alongside TV’s Physical and Platonic). Here, she thrives under the intense scrutiny of extreme close-ups and the fact we are effectively chained to her character’s perspective, however hard things get.
It’s Byrne’s most impressive role to date, one that requires her to delve deep into Linda’s shattered psyche, while employing comic flair to convey disbelief at her spiralling circumstances. Although the film is intelligently scripted by Bronstein, Byrne takes what could have been a highly dislikeable, unforgivably reckless character and renders her compelling, relatable, funny and sympathetic. It’s the mark of a truly great actress.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in cinemas from Friday 20 February; picture: Logan White.