Parenting isn’t easy, and motherhood—from pregnancy to birth to postpartum to the entirety of life—often gets ugly. In fact, the experience of childbirth is among the most physically violent things that can happen to a human body; there is breakage and leakage, and much blood, and intense labor, and those are only the brute physiological facts of the matter. There are all sorts of methods and procedures to make this process more bearable, of course, but all that aside, you are still being rendered as a passage, a causeway; inert and gorily split open so that some small, helpless entity, molded in you, borne heavily by you, can come howling out.
Is that a cynical way of putting it? Maybe, but all the same, when the overwhelmed protagonist of Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Linda, says to her therapist, “I’m one of those people that’s not supposed to be a mom”, one has little difficulty believing it. Never mind that she may have ulterior (i.e. deceptive) motives for stating this: The film is really one long protracted state of crisis, where Linda gradually comes to terms with the feeling that she is unfit to be the mother of her child, and in many ways takes the shape of a birth-trauma metaphor, as the main action kicks in with water breaking through Linda’s apartment roof and is throughout concerned with the physical/emotional toll this resultant burden of care obligates one to uphold.
Though, it should be said, parenting is one thing, having to be the caregiver of a sick child another; Linda’s daughter suffers from some condition which necessitates the insertion of a tube through her abdomen, thus requiring round-the-clock care and the keeping of a strict weight regimen that Linda cannot seem to maintain, no matter how much fatty motel food she feeds her. Why are they at a motel? Because of the hole in the apartment—and why is Linda her sole caregiver? Because her husband is away on a work trip as the captain of some seafaring vessel (for a cruise line, likely) and Linda does not seem to have anyone else to assist her—apart from the hospital staff, though their relationship is clearly antagonistic, as Linda’s ability to provide adequate care for her daughter is constantly put into question.
The only person Linda seems to find a measure of solace with is her therapist, an unnamed colleague whom she subjects to many distressed sessions, continually pushing the boundaries of their professional relationship with aggressive intimations; and they are colleagues because Linda is herself a therapist (recalling that canard of doctors making the worst patients). Her most notable client is a young mother who struggles with thoughts of her baby son being seriously harmed, and is somewhat of a projection of Linda’s own deep anxieties (similar to the plight of the protagonist in Woody Allen’s Another Woman).
This is not a terribly difficult film for reasons of depth, metaphorical layering, allusion, etc. If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You might, however, prove difficult for a number of other reasons, chief among them being its aforementioned state of constant escalation: Linda is seemingly on the verge of breakdown in almost every scene, with every quiet and/or tender moment soon interrupted by some stress-inducing event. To emphasize this ever present DEFCON 1, Bronstein deploys a couple main techniques: 1) there are close-ups galore, with the camera unwilling to let even a single microscopic twitch of an actor’s expression go unnoticed. This decision is clearly indicative of Bronstein’s performance-driven approach, but it also gives a harried feel to the proceedings, bringing the viewer uncomfortably, almost confrontationally, close to their subject. 2) Bronstein will often set up a scene where two grating elements are simultaneously at play, usually in the form of an argument taking place while some annoying and/or disturbing matter intersperses: a child weeping, or a hamster vying to escape its confines. This can be darkly humorous, but it also further draws one into Linda’s chronically high-alert perspective, which is a world sans respite, and beset on all sides by unrealistic expectations.
But the most significant technique is Bronstein’s decision to keep Linda’s daughter faceless throughout the film, with only her (often whining, demanding, agonized) voice coming through to the viewer. Her bodiless presence renders her almost spectral, hanging over the narrative as a constant reminder of what is at stake; or more pointedly, almost like a disassociated consciousness in Linda’s mind, something intimately connected to her yet at the same time disparate from her own personal wants and aims.
In fact, human presences in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You take on either uncomfortably close proximity to the camera or are similarly disembodied as the daughter. Linda’s husband, for instance, harangues her over the phone, half a world away, and others appear as only a voice or are blurred, in the distance, peripheral. And the individuals who do show up on screen are, yes, zoomed-in on, but Bronstein is also keen on picking up glances, side looks, the smirks of inside jokes—paranoia being one of the side effects of crisis mode, and the feeling of constantly being monitored by those whose agenda seems to be your humiliation.
If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is, again, performance-driven, and it is safe to say that Rose Byrne’s Linda might be the best of the year. Best known to the public for her roles in comedies like Bridesmaids and Neighbors, something of that capacity to amuse is preserved here, but only because distress often compels people to act ridiculously; Byrne expresses a full range of emotions as Linda, whose mercurial behavior is easy to make over-the-top, and too comedic, and doubly so with Bronstein’s close-ups sealing off all performative exits. However, she never tilts too far into clownishness, and can be believably dramatic when the occasion calls for it. The part is a tour de force.
A few other pleasantly surprising turns: Conan O’Brien as Linda’s therapist is quite good, especially in a role that does not really require much comedic flair, though such is O’Brien’s forte. His authority as a psychiatrist is believable, and the thinly veiled disdain for Linda’s wheedling is particularly chuckle-inducing. A$AP Rocky as Jamie, a sociable druggie staying at the same hotel, is a much-needed exhibition after his turn as the villain in Spike Lee’s nigh-parodically bad Highest 2 Lowest, confirming that the subpar performance was more of a byproduct of Lee’s script than Rocky’s acting talent. In Bronstein’s script, he is charmingly naturalistic as a stranger whose genuine attempt to endear himself to Linda is caustically rebuffed, reinforcing the notion of her isolation being, in part, self-imposed. And Bronstein herself plays one of the family doctors, and her icily professional demeanor is played so well that it is clear—even before one knows how much autobiography made its way into the script—she herself has been on the opposite side of such institutionalized impersonality.
A final element to note is the dream-like quality of If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You. Its paranoid attention to detail, and the more overtly surrealistic aspects like the red lighting in Linda’s hotel room or that creepy puppet-hamster turn the proceedings almost fabular, nightmarish, even—is the final sequence truly taking place, or is it simply the visualization of Linda’s wish-fulfillment? Either way, something has been transgressed, and the acceptance implicit in her final words (in the midst of the sea, its natal churning) can be read as both a character progression and an almost infantile reversion—with her sickly daughter looking down, smiling, almost maternal.
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