If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Actress and filmmaker Mary Bronstein who is the wife of frequent Safdie Bros collaborator Ronald Bronstein directs her first film since her 2008 film Yeast, that co-stars Greta Gerwig. Based on Bronstein’s own life experiences both as a mother and a therapist, Bronstein’s sophomore feature is a remarkable achievement, a dizzying, honest portrait of motherhood in the modern age. It tells the story of Linda (Rose Byrne), whose daughter we always hear off screen has a mysterious illness who must be fed through a tube each night as she has a severe aversion to food. This creates a lot of anxiety for Linda due to the demands and uncertainty of her daughter’s condition.

Things end up taking a turn for the worse after Linda’s apartment ceiling collapses from a busted water pipe which floods her apartment. It’s a very intense moment, one that instantly reminded me of the abruptness of the opening in P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Of course, this happens at the wrong time as Linda’s husband Charles (Christian Slater) is on duty for the Navy Reserves. Linda ends up having to stay in a motel in Long Island as she waits for the repair. Meanwhile tensions grow on both her personal career and life as everything seems to go awry. At her office, she has sessions with her therapist down the hall played with hilarious and equally dramatic effect by Conan O’Brien. The sessions end up becoming very counter-productive between the two as tensions are released between them. Linda also has issues at work after her patient Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) who is also a mother in crisis that abandons her newborn baby at her office. The only type of relief Linda received from all the chaos is when she drinks wine alone outside of the hotel and ends up building a friendship with one of hotel superintendents named James, played to hilarious and genuine effect by A$AP Rocky.

The film is stylized and hyperreal. You feel the stress Linda experiences, and it feels like a waking nightmare. Scenes like Linda releasing her hidden emotions to her daughter’s doctor (played by Mary Bronstein herself) is brutally honest. Of course, as the film progresses things become more and more chaotic, but Bronstein ends up finding something delicate and eventually angelic by the film’s end. The night beach scenes in the film recall the astonishing beach sequence in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Woody Allen’s Interiors. Like those films, it brings things into focus. The work Bronstein does with Rose Byrne pushes the bounds of screen acting as this is the most emotionally raw and wrenching performances I’ve seen since Mikey Madison in Anora. Byrne plays a wife and mother who is way past the realms of a nervous breakdown.

It’s one of the most honest films to date about motherhood, it holds shades of John Cassavetes with the expressionism of Robert Altman as Bronstein proves she’s a storyteller of sensitivity, empathy and authenticity on the screen. You can’t help but feel Linda’s plight, and Byrne drives in such an emotionally rich performance. Sure It’s quite anxiety inducing but you feel the chaos of motherhood with dizzying effect.