Walking on a Wire: Review of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
★★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Parenting isn’t easy. This a lesson most of have learned the hard way. An even harder lesson is that perhaps not all of us were not cut out to be the supportive, loving, helpful, and wise role models we imagined we might be. Some parents can barely take care of themselves and others cannot bear the weight of the great and horrible burden of being responsible for the life and well-being another human being.
Movies about the agony and ecstasy of parenthood have been around as long as there have been movies. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid was made in 1921. The many iterations of Little Women, along with Kramer vs. Kramer, Mrs. Doubtfire, Parenthood, and Raising Arizona are only the tip of the iceberg of films about families (not necessarily family films). Typically, these types of movies are heartwarming (Losing Isaiah), inspirational (Mask), or funny (The Parent Trap). Some, like The Ice Storm or The Royal Tenenbaums are a bit more layered.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a film about parenting that breaks new ground, taking us to a place where maternal love becomes a duty, a burden, a torment, and then finally, an emotional abyss. The selfishness and egocentrism of the protagonist mother Linda (Rose Byrne) is almost magnificent in its purity even though it is somewhat tempered by her attention—reluctant though it is—to her maternal obligations.
Linda does not have an easy row to hoe. Her daughter (Delaney Quinn) suffers from an eating disorder and is hooked up to a feeding tube that requires constant maintenance. Mom has to drop off her daughter at a hospital day treatment center where the less than understanding attending physician, Dr. Spring (Mary Bronstein) constantly hectors Linda about becoming more involved in the girl’s treatment plan.
Linda then goes to her job as a psychotherapist where she must deal with a covey of difficult patients including Caroline (Danielle MacDonald), a young woman suffering from severe post-partum depression, Kate (Ella Beatty) a girl whose self-absorption dwarfs even Linda’s, and Stephen (Daniel Zolghadri), a creepy teen who is more stalker than patient.
Linda’s husband Charles (Christian Slater), a ship captain, is away on business, so Linda is absolutely isolated with her daughter, who, like most young children, can be petulant, annoying, and demanding. When Dr. Spring tells her is the daughter doesn’t reach a weight goal, her treatment plan will have to be reevaluated, Linda desperately pleads and cajoles the girl to eat.
When Charles does call, he is critical, domineering, and abrasive, telling Linda he wishes he could “sit around all day like her”. Their phone calls always end up in shouting matches with Linda hanging up. So, Linda’s stress level is already off the charts when a burst pipe suddenly causes the ceiling in her apartment to collapse, forcing the two to move into a run-down motel until repairs are made.
In order to cope with this new disaster as well as her normal doses of stress, once her daughter goes to sleep and the feeding machine turns on, Linda steps out to unwind with a bottle of wine, a bowl of weed, her headphones, and the speaker to the monitor in her daughter’s room. She encounters Diana (Ivy Wolk), the obnoxious motel clerk and James (ASAP Rocky), her smarmy neighbor. As her tolerance is stretched to the limit and her increasing inability to deal with the daughter leads to nearly catastrophic circumstances, her descent, like the fastest plummet on a roller coaster, is appallingly breathtaking.
Mary Bronstein’s screenplay and direction tiptoes along the razor’s edge of audience sympathy. Linda, our protagonist, needs to be at least a somewhat sympathetic character, albeit one who leaves her sick daughter alone to go drinking and smoking in a nearby field. She behaviors cannot be excused but are rationalized by the fact her husband is a jerk, her daughter is more than a handful, and that her clients—and the analyst (Conan O’Brien) she seeks out for help, is a major league knob.
Bronstein’s most effective narrative device, however, is to tell the story from Linda’s point-of-view. We watch as her existence descends from the hectic life of a single parent into a splintered fever dream. After they are exiled to the motel, Linda walks back to the apartment to check on the progress of repairs and typically ends up staring at the hole in her bedroom ceiling. As she looks at it, transfixed, she seems to fall into the hole (Alice’s rabbit hole) and sees herself in an emergency room, talking to her daughter who is screaming on a gurney. The audience is never told where or when this event happened, but we can presume it was probably when the child was first diagnosed.
Later in the story, when Linda finds herself unable to deal with a parking lot attendant, she caves to her daughter’s demand for a pet hamster and buys her one. The hamster escapes on the ride home, and instead of being an adorable fluffy little creature resembles something more like a miniature honey badger. All of this, of course, is seen through Linda’s eyes.
When her client Caroline can no longer deal with the stress of being a new mother, she abandons her baby in Linda’s office. Unable to deal with the squalling infant, she tries to call Caroline’s husband, who berates and insults her, before calling the cops. In the context of Linda’s life, it becomes almost impossible not to almost feel Linda projecting her own fears and desires onto Caroline.
In fact, over the course of the movie, Linda is faced with nothing but negativity and criticism. Everyone—except for James—is a jerk to her. Whether this is Linda’s perception reality, or the real world is ambiguous—but is pretty easy to guess. Seeing it from Linda’s point-of-view increases audience sympathy. It really seems as if the world is against her. The reality outside Linda’s head is probably something entirely different.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is not as much of a character study as it is a gender study. Linda is—on at least some levels—the Ur mother of the twenty-first century. She is judged more than anything by her gender. She is expected to care for a child, work, take care of the house, and navigate the health care demands of her child, and she must do all these at the expense of her own identity—and she can’t take it. She is sinking upward into that rabbit hole in the ceiling.
This is Linda’s struggle, and her main defiance is to maintain an identity in the face of every adversity the world can throw at her—as she perceives it. She goes out to get away from her daughter, her burden. She drinks, smokes, and buys drugs with James to separate herself from the woman/server/nurturer she is supposed to be. This is her escape and her perverse affirmation.
As Linda, Rose Byrne gives a magnificently brilliant performance. Watching her nerves wind up like a guitar string tuned to the point of snapping is (while almost like watching an accident) the definition of a virtuosic performance. Linda’s empathy toward her patients is real at the beginning but given more and more grudgingly as her patients continue to heap excessive demands on her.
It would have been very easy to paint Linda as a selfish, nasty, and mean person. She is a negligent mother and a bit of a narcissist, but for all that Byrne manages to infuse her with enough humor, humanity, and pathos to make her they sympathetic heroine she is—sort of. She does seem to feel guilty for being a bad mom—sometimes. Moments of longing, terror, and anger shimmer throughout Byrne’s performance like moonlight on the water. She is brilliant.
Watching Linda unravel before our very eyes is harrowing, disgusting, but ultimately inevitable. The stresses and guilt she must deal with snowball into a realization of who she really is—and isn’t.
This movie is about as far away from a traditional family film as you can get, but it should be required viewing for anyone thinking about having a child.
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