Linda is at the end of her rope. Her young daughter has a condition that requires constant care and supplemental medical feeding. Her husband's job has him almost always absent. A massive issue at her apartment forces her to move into a hotel and fight constantly with her landlord for repairs. And there's a crisis at her therapy practice involving a patient. Can she hold herself together as it feels like everything is falling apart?
There are times it feels like If I Had Legs I'd Kick You barely has a story at all. It's a parade of horrible events, at best uncomfortable to watch, and at worst being a potential reminder of things in your own life you might have been watching a movie to try to escape. This is not a fun watch. It's not a movie from which you will take away anything uplifting. I deeply disliked the experience of the two hours I lost watching it.
But... there are some aspects of this movie I really want to praise -- in part because the Award Industrial Complex has turned its eye toward this movie, and I actually can see why.
Rose Byrne has the film's one Academy Award nomination, a Best Actress nod for her performance as Linda. It's absolutely deserved. Byrne has been on such a long run of comedic roles that I find myself forgetting she first came onto my radar as the star of Damages, a great psychological drama where she held her own opposite Glenn Close. In If I Had Legs I Kick You (yes, a great title I'm deliberately repeating for the fun of it), Byrne captures all the complexity of a mother on the edge: pushing herself well past the point of exhaustion simply because a) society unfairly expects it of her; and b) there's no one else.
Byrne's performance feels utterly real, because it's utterly without vanity. Through intense close-ups (more on that in a moment), she is able to give a remarkably subtle performance where you can see every crack in the facade as it develops. There's scarcely even gallows humor here; this is simply a raw, authentic performance that she inhabits so deeply that the audience can't help but feel it themselves.
She's aided in this feat by the choices of writer-director Mary Bronstein. Bronstein is doing things that on paper sound overly auteurist, navel-gazing, and pretentious. In practice, they're absolutely crucial to narrowing the spotlight on the film's central theme, and they help make Byrne's performance come off as powerfully as it does.
In If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (yup, I did it again), Linda's daughter has no name. We don't even see her face. The focus is entirely on Linda -- and the camera stays in tight close-up on her face for the vast majority of the movie. This doesn't just put the focus on what Linda is going through, it utterly strips away any chance for the audience to bond with her daughter. We never get any of the young girl's human characteristics, any hint of why anyone would sacrifice anything to care for her. As an off-camera voice, the daughter is rendered a whiny, insistent, never-ending black hole of need. Everything Linda has sacrificed in her life that got her to this point feels in fact completely pointless, since we don't even see what any of it was for.
If you've ever found yourself skeptical of highbrow art criticism ("see, the artist's choice of blue is meant to convey a unfulfilled yearning"), you might actually want to watch If I Had Legs I Kicked You. It's as pure a demonstration as I can imagine of the way that particular film-making choices can have a powerful effect on storytelling.
And yet... I didn't feel there was much of a story here to tell, beyond being made to sit and stew in one woman's awful predicament, watching helplessly as it grows more awful by the minute. I actually give If I Had Legs I'd Kick you a D-. Frankly, I hated this aimless, uncomfortable, oftentimes boring... well-made, well-acted, hyper-focused movie. Love it or hate it, you may well find there's something here for you too.
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