Rose Byrne is amongst our best actresses, one who doesn’t get nearly the acclaim that she should. (Not even one Emmy nominations in the three seasons of PHYSICAL on Apple TV +. Unbelievable.) The Australian leading lady who’s been doing flawless American accents for decades now gives another great performance, this time on film as a fraught and frazzled woman at the end of her rope in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU. While watching Byrne work, you might want to give her an Oscar. As for her character, you might want to give her a vacation, a do-over, or maybe even a kick in the pants.
Maybe that’s the point of filmmaker Mary Bronstein’s newest film. She certainly wants to push an audience’s buttons with her study of a woman/mother/psychologist pushed to her own breaking point. Some may laugh at its darkly comic underpinnings. Others may view it as a companion piece to the similarly themed film NIGHT BITCH from filmmaker Marielle Heller last year. Both are studies of women whom society is asking too much of, you see. But for me, I found it quite excruciating to watch Linda’s tale spool out not only because of its unending bleakness, but also because of how awful a mother she was shown to be while trying to take care of her special needs child, a nine-year-old girl with an eating disorder that requires her to be hooked up to a machine and a feeding tube.
At one point, Linda muses about not wanting her daughter. That confession comes in the third act. Yet, it was clear from the first. Linda’s actions throughout the film are so dismissive and even cavalier about her daughter’s needs that it plays as shocking, even disgusting. In instance after instance, in scene after scene, Linda doesn’t do what’s best or even right for her daughter and treats her with such casual abandon, it’s hard to believe we’re being asked to pity Linda. She even tries to pressure others to take care of her daughter, and at numerous times throughout the story, Linda leaves her child alone without any supervision. The terrified, emotionally wrought little girl is hooked up at night to a feeding machine that also needs care and refilling, and yet, Linda doesn’t seem to grasp how crucial all of that is to her daughter’s well-being physically and mentally.
I’m not sure how a film recovers from such a portrayal of parenthood, when we see nothing of said character getting better, but then maybe that’s the point. Linda cannot recover. And thus, neither can we in the audience.
I did feel sorry for her for much of the first act. The film starts with a water pipe in her apartment building bursting and flooding her apartment before causing a hole in the ceiling that qualifies as a catastrophe. Linda was already juggling a lot as her husband (Christian Slater) is overseas for his job and she’s a psychologist with a slate of very needy patients. Even the therapist she is seeing to cope with all her own issues isn’t helping her. He actually adds exponentially to her anxiety. But no matter how awful Linda’s life is, shouldn’t a special needs kid temper some of her petty angst or at least put a lot of it in perspective? I kept hoping so.
Instead, Linda’s angst grows and grows, especially as she and her daughter (Delaney Qinn) are forced to live in a Motel 6 for a few weeks while repairmen fix the home. Then, an interesting choice is made by director Bronstein. She continues to refuse to show the face of the girl. In fact, the character has no name according to the IMDb page. The listing is “Child.” Now, some may laud that as a bold creative prerogative, suggesting that Linda cannot see her child as a person, but mostly as just another problem she’s juggling. Still, that decision, for whatever reason, took me out of the picture. Is this a character or a conceit?
While at the motel, Linda makes it a habit to continually abandon the girl to her room as she downs bottles of wine on the beach, or sometimes smokes weed, or chitchat’s with the motel desk clerk (A$AP Rocky). Linda does bring a baby monitor with her, but still. And then there are times when Linda even runs home at night to check on the repairmen’s progress. All while her kid is in the motel room alone.
Byrne gives a full throttled, committed performance here, of course, and the rest of the cast is quite good too. Conan O’Brien gives a slyly evil take on Linda’s stand-offish therapist in a serious role that he aces. Slater gives a clever performance too, primarily on the phone, as he’s mostly calling in from overseas and becomes more and more stymied by all that’s happening back home. I could sort of see Bronstein’s desire to do something bold and arresting in her writing and direction too, create something so dark and off-putting, but it made me dislike Linda.
And the film.
