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A Scorching Film on What it is to Drown in Maternal Anxiety

This is not a movie for the faint of heart, particularly if great anxiety is a trigger. I say that while recommending a film I think is quite good and lauding it for its willingness to express its intensity of stress so openly. But there is a lot of it, piling up all at once, to the point you feel as hopelessly buried as the film’s central character. The title If I Had Legs I’d Kick You does not refer to anything directly in the film, but it is an incredibly pertinent sentiment in its articulation of that critical feeling of dour helplessness mixed with impotent rage.
It is a concoction writer-director Mary Bronstein handles tremendously well, to the point you wonder how much of the emotional exhaustion of this film -which is all very relatable even if some of the specifics are not- comes from a real place. But then of course it does, even if not personally so. Any one of the episodes that befalls Rose Byrne’s Linda, let alone all of them together, would put considerable strain on the daily life of an ordinary person, and they happen all the time. Powering through it simply isn’t always an option, one needs help and guidance. A complication arises though when you are the one supposed to be giving those things.
Linda is indeed a therapist, every day treating and engaging with patients and their considerable emotional and psychological baggage while critically neglecting her own. Most of it stems from her young daughter -heard but neither seen directly nor named through the duration of the film- who suffers from a difficult medical condition that requires she be hooked up to a heart machine and fed through a tube. Compounding the issues related to accommodating her, her treatment and unique schooling, their apartment floods and the roof caves in -requiring they temporarily relocate to a cheap motel. Troubles with patients, a toxic relationship with an absent husband, a series of frustrating micro-aggressions, and her own horrible guilt and feelings of maternal inadequacy eat away at Linda as she strives for some resolution.
The choice to keep the daughter obscured and the nature of her ailment a mystery (though certainly it resembles some real diseases in children) is a curious one, allowing Bronstein to identify her purely via her relationship to Linda and how what she is going through affects Linda. It is a form of strategic dehumanization -she is cast as more an appendage of Linda and her life than her own person, something that reflects a bit darkly on how Linda perceives her in spite of her general affection. The girl is a burden, much as it is awful for both Linda and the audience to perceive her as such -Linda still loves her but circumstances have been fighting a battle with that love.
This is eventually vocalized in a therapy session with her own colleague down the hall, played by -in a wild casting choice- Conan O’Brien, in his first time playing virtually anything serious. And O’Brien actually works curiously well as a foil here -with a touch of mild banter but nary a smile as his patience is exhausted yet he tries to remain sympathetic. It surprisingly never feels disingenuous or part of some bit. He understands his role is to compliment Byrne though, who is giving the most intense performance of her career. All through the movie she looks ready to snap at a moment’s notice, the effects of carrying so much emotional and psychological weight deeply palpable beneath her half-smiles and baggy eyes. Certainly she maintains herself and her composure better than many of us could under such circumstances, but then she does have moments where she can’t control herself such as when she is dealing with both her contractor on the phone who hasn’t done any work on the apartment and the irate parking attendant out her car window trying to get her attention. The most visceral scene of the movie though may be when her patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) -a new mother paranoid about protecting her infant son (and who is in some manners a mirror to Linda)- sneaks out of her session abandoning her wailing baby; forcing Linda through several desperate efforts to find somebody to take care of the child all while he screams incessantly. Byrne deserves an award for her masterful embodiment of the torture of this sequence alone.
If Linda’s mood does not always manifest externally, it is reflected in that of the movie on the whole. Bronstein imbues every scene with anxiety, ratcheting up the sensations Linda is experiencing. It is an incredibly subjective movie, as it even goes into a few ambiguous trance-like reveries, where she mishears something, or is drawn to what appear to be dim lights in the dark emptiness of her caved-in home, or wanders aimlessly on the beach (she lives in Montauk, perhaps the same one from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) crashing into the coming waves as though attempting to drown herself rather than deal with her onslaught of stresses. All of it is keenly communicated, viscerally felt, Bronstein -who herself is an avatar of pressure, playing the teacher constantly trying to schedule a therapy meeting about Linda’s daughter- has her finger on the pulse of the overwhelming weight of the world, for women and mothers in comparable situations of course, but also for a broader public.
Linda doesn’t take it all on her sleeve -indeed the latter half of the film sees her fighting back numerous figures as she gives in to a certain cynicism and morbid acceptance of her state, one outburst at the long-awaited meeting with other mothers of ailing children is particularly resonant for both how raw and uncompromisingly tough the sentiment is. She makes some ill-advised choices through it -adding further to her plate by entering into a drug arrangement with a neighbour at the motel played by A$AP Rocky; but it all comes from a place of very potent if not wholly justifiable anger and desperation, both for her sake and her daughter’s, much as her resentment may at times cloud it out.
It is by and large a thoroughly riveting character study, unafraid of illustrating some darker or taboo compulsions in its central character around both her own personality and her feelings towards her daughter, while crafting her as entirely sympathetic and relatable as well. Her understanding of her own psychology is something of a curse for her in this situation and it is both why her therapy goes nowhere and her sessions are so interesting -apart from the appearance of a beloved late-night comedian in a role where he never cracks a smile. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is quite a raw and powerful movie, one that shows Bronstein -who has gone seventeen years since her debut film- has both a sharpness and originality as well-suited to the times as they are to her subjects. So many feel, without it being so literal necessarily, the intensity that Linda goes through here. And we are ready to talk about it in art.

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