Rose Byrne stars in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.Logan White/The Associated Press
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Written and directed by Mary Bronstein
Starring Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien and A$AP Rocky
Classification 14A; 114 minutes
Opens in select theatres Oct. 17, before expanding Oct. 24
Critic’s Pick
There are several moments engineered inside Mary Bronstein’s fantastic new high-wire comedy/drama/horror film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You that force the audience to quickly choose between laughing, crying and screeching like a banshee. To list all the many instances would take almost the runtime of the film itself, so I’ll just go with the one that still plays in my mind several months after encountering it.
After shepherding her young daughter between appointments at an eating-disorder clinic and running various errands around town, the might-as-well-be-single mother Linda (Rose Byrne) – whose husband is perpetually out of town for work – has been coaxed, (bullied, really) into buying a pet hamster. But the little critter is such a nuisance – as high-strung and volatile as everything else in Linda’s life – that it escapes the moving car and, well, your reaction to the next few seconds will provide a good litmus test for how you’ll take the entirety of Bronstein’s film. I was cackling, lost in the pulse-pounding delirium of the movie’s unshakable energy, as darkly hilarious as it is overwhelming. But there are some people who won’t even make it to the Hamster Moment.
How Rose Byrne kicked the screen till it bleeds daylight in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
I don’t blame them exactly – Bronstein finds suffocation to be synonymous with provocation – yet anyone who checks out early will rob themselves of not only the most electric film of the year, but a lead performance that feels singular, towering, even generational.
It would be unfair to call Byrne as Linda a revelation. The Australian actress has been charming and bewitching audiences for decades, albeit mostly through mainstream comedy fare, becoming one of the few non-bro members of the Judd Apatow crew: Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek, the two Neighbors films and Apple TV’s vastly underrated Platonic. Yet as powerful a comic force as Byrne can be, she’s never had as tremendous a moment as the one Bronstein is giving her here: an opportunity to turn deeply dark character drama into something hilariously ghastly, or perhaps ghastly hilarious.
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Embracing the many gags of her life – instead of, say, choking on them – is likely the only way that Linda manages to get through her days without breaking down completely. In addition to caring for her daughter, who refuses to eat much of anything, Linda must deal with the following crises: a largely absent husband whose constant phone calls are more aggravating than reassuring; an openly hostile therapist (a delightfully prickly Conan O’Brien, of all people); and a home whose ceiling has recently caved in, forcing the family to temporarily live in a dingy motel overseen by a charming superintendent (hip-hop star A$AP Rocky).
A$AP Rocky and Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.Logan White/The Associated Press
And then there is the film’s first, juicy punchline, one of many: Linda is herself a therapist, although it’s an open question as to whether she’s in any position to help her patients when she can barely manage her own waking hours.
Taken together, the above elements – a cavalcade of disasters both annoying and existential – could be assembled into a quirky indie comedy that disappears into the Sundance Film Festival ether. But Bronstein infuses every moment of If I Had Legs... with a jagged kind of intensity, stringing together scenes with an adrenalized propulsion that makes a story of a mother struggling against a world pitted against her feel both singular and universal.
The writer-director, who partially based the story on her own struggles as a mother to an ill child (and who hasn’t made a film since her directorial debut Yeast in 2008), also commits to several crucial stylistic gambits, all but one of which pays off wonderfully.
First, she shoots a good portion of the film in tight close-ups, positioning Byrne’s face in the centre of the frame. As Linda’s world falls apart, Bronstein challenges her star to convey the chaos purely through the mechanics of facial tics, a kind of cinematic obstacle that Byrne pole-vaults over with impressive, almost alarming ease.
Bronstein also keeps two crucial characters largely off-screen. Neither Linda’s daughter (voiced by Delaney Quinn) nor her husband (whose eventual appearance offers a surprise celebrity jolt) show their faces until the very end – a trick that works better when it comes to the dad than the child, if only because the latter offers a kind of sentimental schtick that Bronstein otherwise expends so much energy eschewing.
Yet any minor missteps are washed away by Bronstein’s biggest visual leap, which finds the film occasionally dipping into something of a supernatural psychodrama. As Linda continues to fixate on the hole in her home – curiously, this is the third film of the season, after Rose of Nevada and the aptly titled Roofman, whose narrative hinges on the structural integrity of a ceiling – her gaze begins to imagine an otherworldly portal, perhaps one leading to the inner recesses of her mind, or a far darker realm. These moments do not define Bronstein’s film so much as punctuate it: There’s a fine line between the world of the living and the dead, and Linda is just barely tethered to the former.
And Byrne never lets you forget that tenuousness. She’s here to kick the dark till it bleeds daylight.