If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You, director-writer Mary Bronstein's gut-wrenching black comedy, is the latest, and by far the most comprehensive, iteration of an idea that's increasingly popular in American cinema: motherhood is hell, and a mother going through that hell must say so without fear of judgment. Mariel Heller”Night bitch(2024), taken from the novel by Rachel Yoder, made a more conceptual version of this argument: it showed us an artist so exhausted and defeated by life with a toddler that she turned into a wild dog at night—a quasi-supernatural twist that, for all its wit, seemed strangely neutral when translated from page to screen. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal dramatized maternal duality more poignantly in her 2021 adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel.”Lost Daughter” about a middle-aged professor who spends her vacation on the coast reflecting on the failure of being, in her words, an “unnatural mother.”
Bronstein's film is her first full-length film after her debut:Yeast(2008) – there is a version of this phrase. “I’m one of those people who shouldn’t be a mom,” laments a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne). Her young daughter (Delaney Quinn) suffers from a chronic gastrointestinal disease, and her husband, a ship captain, is away at sea. Over the course of several difficult days, an already difficult situation is aggravated by nightmarish setbacks. the ceiling of Linda's apartment, flooding the place and forcing her and her daughter to move into a motel. Linda, a therapist, must juggle her job with an inevitably labor-intensive renovation project that comes to a halt when the contractor has a family emergency. (There are plenty of similar emergencies in this film.) Linda also drags her daughter to the clinic for regular treatments, none of which seem to do any good. There, she is repeatedly scolded, first by a short-tempered parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg) and then by a doctor (Bronstein), who warns Linda of the consequences if her daughter does not reach her goal weight of fifty pounds soon.
Bronstein, her every utterance filled with deadpan passive aggression, skillfully cast herself as one of Linda's many antagonists. It's a caustic sense of self-awareness, as if she were confessing but also reinforcing her own heavy-handed tactics behind the camera, pushing Linda to wild dramatic extremes. But Linda can handle these extremes up to a point. At the beginning of her stay at the clinic, her daughter, aware of the main difference between her parents, describes her father as firm and her mother as “pliable” – an assessment that Linda rejects, clearly stings, but which all her subsequent actions confirm. It is a measure of the film's justice that it treats this quality as both a strength and a weakness. After all, it's Linda's malleability that allows her to laugh rather than cry over a nearly ruined dinner, and her considerable patience helps her navigate the flow of difficult patients at her workplace, the Psychological Arts Center. (They are played by actors Daniel Macdonald, Daniel Zolghadri and Ella Beatty, among others.) But Linda's flexibility can also backfire, as when she gives in to her daughter's incessant demands and buys her a pet hamster, a rash decision with dire but thankfully short-lived consequences.
Byrne the actor turns out to be flexible in the best sense; her performance is a miracle of tragicomic flexibility. Whatever she's doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily muttering instructions into her phone, trudging down a hallway in a fog, or expressing her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to appear simultaneously psychologically stripped and physically exhilarated under the camera's unflinching gaze. (Director of photography Christopher Messina shot much of the film in extreme close-up.) In some of Byrne's most memorable big-screen roles—the rich, pampered queen bee in Bridesmaids (2011), the imperious Bulgarian arms dealer in Spy (2015)—she portrayed a natural comic villain, smug, hypercompetent rival of the clumsy loser heroine. “If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You” flips this script with inspiration; Here Linda is clumsy, at least that's what everyone around her thinks.
As in The Lost Daughter, the beach beckons strongly. If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You is set in Montauk, and the water seems to exert an almost gravitational pull on Linda's psyche, as if the raging undercurrents of the sea are inextricably linked to her own. Like Night Bitch, Bronstein's film has an element of night terror: Linda doesn't turn into a dog, but as she wanders the neighborhood after dark, her demons feel completely released. The contours of night and day are so sharp that at times her adventures take on an almost vampiric quality: when the sun is shining, she seems exhausted, locked in and almost immobilized by her schedule. At least after dark, while her baby is asleep, she can sneak out for a bottle of wine, a toke of weed, or something stronger. She tries to get the latter with the help of the motel manager James, with whom she strikes up a ridiculously unpredictable, often belligerent friendship. (James is played by rapper A$AP Rocky, his second strong performance of the year, following Spike Lee's “Highest 2 Lowest.”) These are fleeting pleasures, but for Linda they are a crucial respite, allowing her to convince herself, if only for an hour or two, that she still has some semblance of a life of her own.
When If I Had Legs I'd Kick You premiered at the Sundance International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, its incessant panic attack aesthetic drew critical attention from brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, whose films such asDaddy Long Legs(2009), “Good time(2017), and especially “Uncut Gems(2019), made for equally intense viewing. The comparisons made sense: Bronstein is married to director, editor and actor Ronald Bronstein, who worked on Safdie's films in various capacities and was one of the producers of If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You. As unreasonable as it might be to assume that the Safdies have a network of familial influences, they are hard to avoid here, especially in a film particularly attuned to the nuances of marital give-and-take.
From scene to scene, If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You can seem so formally aggressive, bordering on aggressive, that it takes a while to realize that it is also a film of strategic omissions and structured absences. Linda's daughter is never named and is often heard but rarely seen. In Bronstein's most risky formal move, the child's face is carefully hidden from view in every shot except one. Instead, the girl is abstracted into various body parts: a pair of legs dangling from a toilet, or a belly with a feeding tube protruding from it, an image that emphasizes her almost umbilical dependence on Linda. At night, the girl becomes a blur of noise: the beeps and whirrs of the machine she's hooked up to while she sleeps, or the whimpers and snores coming from the baby monitor Linda carries with her on long walks after dark. However, when she is not sleeping, Linda's daughter is a voice, and a very active one, energetic, always laughing, chatting, demanding and whining up a storm. Hiding the daughter's face is a jarring but effective reflection of one of Bronstein's central ideas: how the people we love can drain us to the point that we no longer see them for who they are.
