Rose Byrne has made a career playing second bananas, comic villains and too-doting wives, but she finally gets a starring showcase role in a bracing, manic drama intriguingly titled If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. She’s never before had the chance to show such ferocity, and writer-director Mary Bronstein tunes the whole movie to Byrne’s brittle, on-the-verge-of-combustible screen presence.
She plays a woman named Linda, whose world is coming apart — sometimes literally. Her husband is away on business and she’s left to care for their ill young daughter. As the film opens, a flood of water comes crashing through her bedroom ceiling, leaving a giant hole above the bed.
These early scenes establish the movie’s oppressive style: chaotic sound design, claustrophobic cinematography and ruthless narrative logic. It’s a sustained cacophony of overlapping stresses. The kid is screaming in the backseat of the car, Linda is yelling at someone on the phone, another driver rear-ends her, and everyone continues screaming while the camera hovers inches from Byrne’s face. The camera practically latches onto her like a parasite.
It’s so close, in fact, that we don’t actually see either Linda’s husband or daughter for most of the movie. They’re off-screen voices or out-of-focus blobs. The movie becomes a study in one woman’s tunnel vision.
When we learn Linda is a therapist, it feels like a sick joke. She’s so selfish, so wantonly cruel to people who stumble into her crosshairs, that it seems impossible she could ever actively listen to anyone. Her patients are overstepping into her personal life, which she vents about to her own therapist (Conan O’Brien), whose office is down the hall from hers. It makes for awkward encounters at the coffee maker.
While renovations are being done, Linda and her daughter are staying at a seaside motel. Linda wanders the parking lot and down to the shore, a baby monitor in one hand and an open bottle of wine in another. As she starts a friendship with a motel employee (A$AP Rocky), we start digging our fingernails into our palms, because we know everything’s going to come crashing down just like that bedroom ceiling.
I must admit that I’m drawn to slow-motion disaster films like this, though I know they cause most people to flee for the exits. Movies can be a form of escape, but this one is a trap, sucking us into the quicksand of its protagonist’s bad luck and worse decisions.
But by placing us so firmly in Linda’s frazzled headspace, the movie is also asking us to, on some level, empathize with it. And sometimes we do. I happened to see If I Had Legs I’d Kick You the same week as Lynne Ramsay’s emotionally taxing new film Die My Love, another stylistically alienating nightmare about the horrors of motherhood. Both movies are straining to keep us on edge, but If I Had Legs really works while Die My Love really doesn’t.
I think it comes down to Byrne’s performance, which is surely one of the best of the year. There must be something freeing about playing a woman who gets to be narcissistic, impulsive, mean, explosive, short-tempered, short-sighted, and also — somehow — a caring, nurturing mother (at least when it’s called for). If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an endurance test, but an excitingly daring one.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM and Saturday afternoons at 2 PM on SPR News.