CAREGIVING, it has been said, calls on us to lean in to love we didn’t know possible.
Such love is at the very core of director Mary Bronstein’s new film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, an anxiety-inducing, and at times totally exhausting, viewing experience about motherhood and the overwhelming stresses that often come with it. If it’s escapism you are after, you won’t find it here.
A wearying rollercoaster ride up and down stress mountain, Bronstein’s film is more likely to bring first-time parents out in a rash as they hyperventilate into their popcorn bags while crying over their life choices on a rare date-night out. Sure, it might make you feel less alone, but you will go home in a cold sweat from its delirium-hinting reminder of what awaits you.
If I Had Legs stars the underappreciated yet totally brilliant Rose Byrne as Liz – giving the performance of a lifetime – as a chardonnay swilling mother trying to hold it all together as her world comes crashing down around her.
Her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is marked absent, working away from home for the next eight weeks as Liz struggles to get her head round her daughter’s mysterious illness and a crater-size gaping hole in the roof of their apartment, which seems to gesture to the black abyss she is lurching straight into.
To make matters worse, Liz’s therapist and work colleague (Conan O’Brien) is having none of her frazzled tantrums, mislaid affections, and inappropriate late night jabbering’s. Liz feels increasingly alone and finds herself leaning on her young neighbour James (A$AP Rocky) for conversation, confirmation her sanity is still intact, and illicit drugs.
The constant worry of her young daughter, whose face we never see throughout the film, the bleeping of her feeding machine, which she depends on as “real food is too squishy”, the hole which is never going to be repaired, and her husband too busy to hear her pleas for help, all add to Liz’s irritability and impending cataclysmic meltdown.
(4/5)