Rose Byrne finally gets the starring role worthy of her talent in writer-director Mary Bronstein's scabrous dramedy IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU. It's the film that Marielle Heller's NIGHTBITCH could have been if it had only had the courage.
Byrne plays a woman struggling to reconcile herself to what is effectively single motherhood of a child with a severe eating disorder. Her apartment has been flooded, she's living in a crappy motel, she is condescended to by her daughter's therapists, and pretty much every man she encounters is demanding that she "just handle it" because THEY have work to do. No matter that she herself works full time.
Naturally, Byrne's character turns to self-medication and occasionally screaming into pillows to get through both day and night. But there are no easy answers. Even as we build to a dramatic spontaneous medical intervention we know that the daughter isn't suddenly cured, and just because the husband finally came home it doesn't mean that our protagonist is finally understood or supported.
There are many things to love about this movie. The performances are uniformly superb, and Byrne deservedly won the Silver Bear at Berlin for hers. In smaller roles I was genuinely surprised at how good both Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky were. Perhaps it's no coincidence that they both play the only men who show some empathy and put down boundaries. Indeed A$AP Rocky's motel worker Jamie may well be the moral centre of the film, even as he's ordering a brick of cocaine.
Behind the lens I loved Mary Bronstein's script and most of her directorial choices. (She also plays the deliciously passive-aggressive Dr Spring.) She absolutely skewers the delusional myths that society pedals young girls and women. The sick daughter hankers after a hamster because she has a vision of it being her fluffy best friend as is then horrified when it's as scared and anxious as she is. One of Byrne's patients is a young mother who secretly started seeing a therapist when she fell pregnant and is petrified that she will do violence to her child. And Byrne's character herself is a wide gaping hole of guilt and shame at her prior choices around motherhood and whether she is cut out to be a mother at all. Society tells women that childbearing is inevitable and that the experience will be joyful. This film is about what happens when it isn't.
The only thing stopping me giving this film five starts is its running time. I think that when you have a film this deliberately claustrophobic in its concerns and shooting style - and so desperately, frustratingly, sad and angry - that there's a limit to what an audience can take. If this film had been twenty minutes shorter it would have been perfect. That and taking out a final shot of the child which I found its only slight turn to mawkishness.
IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU has a running time of 113 minutes and is rated R. It played Sundance and Berlin 2025.
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