Cultural critic Greil Marcus once gushed about all the emotion, pain and drama you get just by looking at Bill Pullman’s face. “In each of his best roles,” Marcus wrote, “there comes a moment when his face and the weight pressing on it … become the whole of the drama. The face concentrates motives and events so suggestively that it becomes its own landscape: a window onto an America defined not by hope but by fear, not by judgment but by paranoia, not by mastery but by sin, crime, and error.”
I thought about Marcus’ words when I saw Rose Byrne’s face in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. First introduced in a tight close-up, Byrne’s drained mug immediately establishes just how much weight is holding down her sad, desperate ass. And the weight never lets up.
Byrne gives her most woman-on-the-verge performance to date as Linda, a therapist who is also the mother of a sick little girl (Delaney Quinn). But trust me when I say Legs is not about the kid. For most of the movie, we never see the girl’s face. But we definitely hear all of her incessant questions, loud tantrums and general kid noise. In this world, kids are seldom seen but always heard. This unnamed child’s disembodied voice serves almost as Linda’s nagging-but-adorable inner monologue, flooding her mind with anxieties and insecurities.
Legs is the latest intense but sympathetic motherhood-as-horror-show to hit theaters. (Think The Babadook without the supernatural symbolism or We Need to Talk About Kevin without the nihilistic self-loathing.) Much like her husband Ronald Bronstein — who has co-written nerve-rattling urban dramedies with the Safdie brothers (Bronstein and Benny Safdie also serve as producers here) — actress/writer/director Mary Bronstein sends her already-stretched-thin protagonist on a lonesome journey that gets more bizarre and surreal when she starts flirting with self-destruction.
After her bedroom apartment is flooded due to a hole in the ceiling, Linda and her daughter find temporary lodging at a motel. When her daughter is asleep, hooked to a feeding tube, Linda sneaks out to guzzle wine and listen to music on her iPhone. She strikes up an acquaintanceship with a leery neighbor (rapper A$AP Rocky), who hooks her up with dark-web drugs. Instead of having her protagonist dive into a salacious, far-fetched fling, Bronstein is more focused on showing how even sketchy folk can get dragged into this woman’s quiet, personal chaos.
Bronstein really leans into how taking care of an ill and possibly autistic kid is a thankless job that no one wants to help you with. With her away-on-business husband (Christian Slater, playing another nagging, disembodied voice) available only via phone, Linda looks to one of her therapist co-workers (Conan O’Brien) for advice and, hopefully, emotional support. I gotta say, it’s weird as hell seeing relentless ginger clown O’Brien take on the role of an uptight shrink who is clearly put off by his colleague’s mood swings and not-so-subtle advances. He always looks just as confused and uncomfortable as we are. But he’s still the closest thing this movie has to a helpful, upstanding human being. Nearly everyone Linda comes in contact with — from a doctor (played by Bronstein) who keeps pressuring her to feed her finicky kid to the repairmen who take their sweet time fixing that hole — is selfish and clueless to an almost-absurd degree. Then again, this could be Bronstein conveying how parents usually see anyone who refuses to sympathize with their plight as an instant asshole.
Linda’s clients aren’t a big help either. Continually coming in with petty grievances, these people are so oblivious and self-centered, it doesn’t hit them that the one they look to for guidance is a visible mess. Linda also meets her lousy-parent match in paranoid new mom Caroline (Danielle Macdonald).
As the child of a single mom who also took care of a mentally disabled kid, I am reminded by Legs that parenthood, especially for those who don’t have a proper support system, can be a hellish uphill battle. Throughout the movie, Linda keeps gravitating back to that hole in her ceiling, a dark void that — in her mind — occasionally emits flickering pieces of light. Needless to say, that hole is a metaphor for her whole life, as she tries to snag brief, glowing moments of respite — like the childlike look she displays while wolfing down a roll of cheese from a pizza — amid her endless daily grind of being a parent.
As If I Had Legs I’d Kick You establishes, parenthood will have you looking all fucked-up in the face. But it’s worth it if the child you’re sacrificing everything for smiles back at you.
