When running water collapses the ceiling of Linda’s apartment at the beginning of Mary Bronstein’s anxiety-inducing drama, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, some directors might focus on the screaming or the confusion. Perhaps Linda and her daughter would run out of the apartment or the camera would focus on the gushing onto Linda’s bed as it rises around her and her daughter’s ankles. What Bronstein does, though, is focus on the hole–the actual site of destruction. It’s a gaping wound that will be the catalyst for Linda’s ongoing ire for the duration of our stay with her. Bronstein slowly pushes in on that hole to take us closer, because Legs is about confrontation as much as it is about denial.
We immediately glom onto Linda’s plight, because we would never wish that kind of accident onto anyone. It’s also because Linda is played by Rose Byrne. It doesn’t matter where you know Byrne from, because once you see her in one thing, you are excited whenever she pops up in anything else. Maybe you saw her in Damages with Glenn Close or stealing the mic from Kristen Wiig in Bridesmaids or hamming it up as an elegant villain opposite Melissa McCarthy in Spy. Her comic timing is matched mightily by her own dramatic chops. Watch Platonic and then hunt down The Meddler.
Legs positions us right in the middle of Linda’s frustrations as they grow and grow. Her daughter suffers from an illness that keeps her hooked onto a feeding tube, but Linda struggles to get her to eat to get her up to a doctor recommended weight to remove it. Her husband is out of town, and he won’t return for another five weeks. Living in a nearby motel, her husband tells her that she needs to relax and other people remind her that she needs to “put her own oxygen mask on before helping others.” People who don’t understand someone else’s level of stress always seem to dole out advice, don’t they? Linda longs for nighttime when she can grab a few bottles of wine from the front desk or smoke some weed without anyone bothering her.
Linda’s therapist, played by an exasperated and frustrated Conan O’Brien, rolls his eyes whenever she asks him what she should do about every problem in her life, and she is also a therapist. We see a tight, narrow hallway with doors that lead to claustrophobic rooms–how anyone can speak about their mental health issues in such quarters is beyond me, and, surely, it can’t help how Linda feels about the walls closing in on her. Danielle Macdonald plays, Caroline, a new mother who cannot be away from her baby but also clings to Linda’s guidance. A$AP Rocky plays James, the motel super who always seems to find Linda when she wants to be alone who sometimes gets yanked into her orbit.
Bronstein keeps the camera so tight on Byrne’s face that it will purposefully block other characters from view sometimes getting so cloes that her eyes are the only thing that we can see. Even we, the audience, have trapped her as Bronstein dissects how everyone, both strangers and people in Linda’s life, don’t seem to want to help a mother in crisis. How much responsibility do we bear in pushing women to the verge of a nervous breakdown?
At the center of it all is Byrne’s brilliant performance. Linda’s anger, confusion, and frustration manifest onto her skin–when one problem crawls closer to being solved, another sticks onto her body in a place where she can’t reach it. In many moments, Linda looks upward, and I couldn’t help but think she’s unconsciously asking for grace. She constantly asks for help from others, but there’s something about Byrne’s eyes, when relaxed and close to tears, that break through the tension, the anxiety, and the stress. Bronstein takes us on a hellishly emotional ride, but those eyes carry a quiet plea that cut through all the strain.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens in theaters on October 10.
