Immediate reactions following the Sundance premiere of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You praised Rose Byrne’s performance as “powerful” and “monumental,” the sort of things that undoubtedly nudge at a successful Oscar campaign in the making. I’m not saying Byrne isn’t great in this movie—she certainly is, especially in moments of comedic discombobulation—but her performance is designed to easily impress through intensity. Byrne plays Linda, a flustered alcoholic mother with a husband who’s never there and a young daughter who’s sick and requires a feeding tube. Linda has stumbled through her life with a sense of self-doubt and is this close to just giving up. Despite this meaty character, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a movie that feels written and engineered to deliver moments and clips rather than offer any depth on the topics purportedly at hand: the burden of motherhood, feelings of inadequacy, alienation, lopsided gender dynamics. The movie is very satisfied with playing off direct metaphors, the kind that don’t really force any questions.
While Byrne as Linda is very good at conjuring intense frustration at a cacophony of mundane daily inconveniences, the movie as a whole relies purely on hidden hand trickery, slowly revealing very serious issues amid sarcastic and jokey banter. There have been very unfair and unjust comparisons to John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which seem to forget that the central woman character of that movie isn’t someone who needs to be solved, but understood. Director Mary Bronstein’s approach in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, on the other hand, is one of trying to diagnose her character’s problem for the audience. Linda is someone who is broken, and we only get to know how broken she is through grand reveals, the most “shocking” coming from—in cosmically cliche fashion—an outburst with her therapist (Conan O’Brien). The film’s choice to leave Linda’s child out of the frame for almost the entire film is interesting, but like everything else, it’s ultimately reduced to a trick that feels prescriptive. By the end, it feels like the movie neatly answered all of its own questions. R, 113 min.
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