Sometimes, life sucks. Sometimes life sucks so much that you can’t not tell people about it. And sometimes they won’t believe you when you tell them or, more likely, they won’t empathize because they just don’t get it. And that is why films like the enigmatically titled If I Had Legs I’d Kick You exist. If you take nothing else home from this bizarre narrative, you might remember having the sense of Rose Byrne playing a modern-day Sisyphus, constantly rolling a metaphorical boulder up a hill between smoke breaks, alone, only to have it keep rolling back down.
Linda (Byrne) isn’t a single mother, but she may as well be, for her husband is a naval captain and he’s at sea. Always. Linda is a psychotherapist, which is just about the least rewarding position there is, especially with her personal collection of needy catastrophes. This is, of course, when Linda has the ability to work. She is the mother of -wiki sez- a small child with a pediatric feeding disorder. Bottom line is the kid can only be fed by tube and needs hospital time every day.
The filmmaker (writer/director Mary Bronstein) made a conscious effort never to show the child’s face on film. This is a story entirely about Linda, nobody else. The spouse is background. The child is background. As a parent, you might be horrified. Exactly the opposite is true in real life, especially if you have a special needs child.
Not five minutes after our introduction to Linda, a woman who is clearly on her own and in desperate need of relief, her ceiling caves in, flooded by a deluge of water presumably from an upstairs apartment. Was it the upstairs neighbor … or was it aliens? Yes, that is a legitimate question in this film. Is our heroine having a psychotic breakdown trying to deal with everyone? I should point out here that everything in this film is … off. That is the best way of putting it. Linda constantly searches for sanity in the form of downtime. She 
only gets downtime in one of two ways: 1) When she is in therapy herself 2) When the child is asleep, for which she has a constant radio monitor, so it’s only downtime in the sense of not being 100% present.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is an odd film starting with the quixotic title and never relenting. It has a constant verisimilitude of genuine life, but never quite holds up to scrutiny. We get to decide whether this is personal vantage, a long drug trip, or just a world that doesn’t quite work. It isn’t fun. And Linda seemed like a classic modern-day mess: a person who seems to live by “fake it until you make it” without ever making it. You don’t create a film like this because you want a rollicking carnival ride or an audience to stand up an applaud when it is done. Films like this happen because somebody was either so frustrated or so pissed off that they needed witnesses. Because at the end of the day, this is a film about one woman struggling with her own sanity. This is a fantastic performance. I love how Rose Byrne has embraced middle age and hope she is allowed to do more of this.
There once was a mother named Linda
Paying for every way she has sinned-a
In the form of onus
Going alone as a bonus
Good thing she’s not very thin-skinned-a
Rated R, 113 Minutes
Director: Mary Bronstein
Writer: Mary Bronstein
Genre: Confusing titles
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: #MeToo
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: “WTF is going on here?”
