If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens with an opening. The ceiling of Linda’s (Rose Byrne) apartment caves in, creating a giant hole which sends Linda and her daughter to stay indefinitely at a crappy hotel. Linda is really tired. She works as a therapist and is the mother of a child with a debilitating eating disorder. She is handling the kid and the hole on her own as her husband travels for work.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is solely about Linda, which is a paradoxical premise, because nothing in Linda’s life is about her.
The film places (too) much emphasis on the visual of the ceiling hole. Sometimes the camera climbs into the hole, revealing firefly flashes of light and distant echoes of Linda talking with her child. There’s memories in there, maybe, or emotions that Linda cannot let herself feel. Sometimes Linda examines the hole and something sorta freaky happens. This storyline is the least interesting aspect of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The moments in the film that are representative or metaphorical are far less effective than the gritty and exhausting material reality the film portrays.
What I like about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is its commitment to the truly shitty. Linda’s hotel is shitty, with its sassy front desk clerk and its thin walls. The food Linda has to coax her daughter to eat is shitty; greasy pizza stripped of cheese and wet-looking breakfast plates. The offices where Linda works are shitty, a row of shoddy white doors in a shoddy white hallway. Empathy for Linda is built easily from seeing her circumstances. I would also be freaking the fuck out if I were her.
Linda spends her days listening to people complain or cry, and then walks down the hall to complain or cry to her own therapist. Her daughter’s condition requires intense treatment that keeps her out of school and keeps nurses dogging Linda for her failure to get her kid’s weight up. While her husband gets to watch baseball games during his hours off, Linda is sprinting between full-time life commitments. Linda is sometimes able to drum up enough of a good mood to sing along with her daughter in the car, but she inevitably ends every night by drinking a bottle of wine and smoking cigarettes, locked outside her motel room.
But this movie is not about the failings of the modern mental healthcare system, or about the impossible standards of good motherhood. This movie is really, really just about Linda. We follow her through every moment of her day, mostly in close-up. We never see her daughter in full, only in disjointed body parts (and even those visuals are rare). Her husband is a disembodied voice over the phone. When her patients talk at her, the camera points at Linda; her body slumped, her eyes heavy, her hair falling out of its high bun.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You understands with radical (though not pleasant) acceptance that there is not much else to do or say about these things that are affecting Linda’s life. Screaming them into the void is changing very little. The systems in place to help her are not necessarily making things worse, but they’re also not really helping. There is no option to stay the course, but staying the course sucks really hard.
Byrne’s performance is expert. She plays a woman who is no longer a raw nerve but a flickering light which sparks into occasional sobbing, screaming flashes before dimming exhaustedly back down. She plays Linda as driven weakly by something unknown; both primal and uninspired. Linda screams at her husband for not doing enough and speaks openly with her therapist about her exhaustion toward her daughter’s need for care, even mournfully daydreaming at one point about an aborted fetus that she maybe should have kept instead. But none of these painful outpourings receive much reaction from the world around her.
The more I’ve sat with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the more it’s ultimately moved me. Nothing Linda confesses to in the film about motherhood or marriage or the general grate of living is special or new. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You knows we’ve already confessed to all of the shitty, hard motherhood stuff and womanhood stuff in various artistic iterations, personal conversations, and journal entries. There are therapist’s offices to scream about your neuroses and your past abortions and your high-maintenance kid, but you will likely not get a reaction out of your therapist (and probably not your friends and husband, either).
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is refreshing in its presentation of a woman on the brink, because it simultaneously acknowledges that it’s become a mundanity to be a woman on the brink or to present a story of a woman on the brink. Everyone is drowning right now. Everyone has some terrible feelings about being a parent or a wife or a person. It’s unspecial, but all-consuming. It’s banal and it’s potent. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t offer a solution as much as it does a conspiratorial shrug; an “I know, right?” as you try to scream loud enough to startle something loose in yourself or your life.
