Talented Maternal Freak In “If I Had Two Legs I’d Kick You”
If I Had Two Legs I’d Kick You, an unnerving black comedy from director and screenwriter Mary Bronstein, is the latest and certainly the most comprehensive version of an idea that has gained increasing traction in American movies: motherhood is hell, and a mother who endures that hell should say so, without fear of judgment. Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch” (2024), based on Rachel Yoder’s novel, offered a higher version of this argument: it showed us an artist so exhausted and defeated by life with a young child that she turned into a feral dog in the night—an almost supernatural development that, for all its intelligence, seemed strangely neutral in translation from page to screen. Director Maggie Gyllenhaal depicts the duality of motherhood most clearly in her adaptation, from 2021, of Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, about a middle-aged college professor on a coastal vacation contemplating the failure of being, as she puts it, an “unnatural mother.”
Bronstein’s film — her first since her debut Yeast (2008) — flaunts its own version of that line. “I’m one of those people who’s not supposed to be a mother,” laments a mother named Linda (Rose Byrne). Her young daughter (Delaney Quinn) suffers from a chronic gastrointestinal disease, and her husband, a ship’s captain, is away at sea. Over the course of several fraught days, an already difficult situation is compounded by nightmarish setbacks. A massive hole opens in the ceiling of Linda’s apartment, flooding the place and forcing her and her daughter to move into a hotel. Linda, a therapist, must balance her job with the inevitably time-consuming repairs, which come to a halt when the contractor has a family emergency. (Such emergencies abound in this film.) Linda also drags her daughter to a clinic for regular treatments, but none of them seem to help. There, she is repeatedly berated, first by an angry parking attendant (Mark Stolzenberg), then by a doctor (Bronstein), who warns Linda of the consequences if her daughter does not soon reach her goal weight of fifty pounds.
Bronstein, whose every word was laced with deadpan passive-aggression, was clever in portraying herself as one of Linda’s many adversaries. It’s a searing touch of self-awareness, as if she’s acknowledging her harsh tactics behind the camera, but also exacerbating them, as she pushes Linda toward wild dramatic extremes. But Linda can handle these extremes, to an extent. Early in the clinic, her daughter identifies a key difference between her parents, describing her father as firm while her mother as “extendable”—an assessment that Linda dismisses as clearly caustic, but which all her subsequent actions confirm. It is a measure of the film’s justice that it sees this quality as both a strength and a weakness at the same time. After all, it is Linda’s resilience that allows her to laugh rather than cry over a nearly ruined dinner, just as it is her great patience that helps her get through a group of difficult patients at her workplace, called the Psychiatric Arts Center. (Played by actors Danielle Macdonald, Daniel Zollaghadry, Ella Beatty, and others.) But Linda’s resilience can also backfire, as when she gives in to her daughter’s constant demands and buys her a pet hamster—an ill-advised decision, with horrific but short-lived consequences.
Byrne turns out to be a flexible actor in the best sense; Her performance is a marvel of tragic resilience. Whatever she’s doing at any given moment—rolling her eyes, sleepily mumbling instructions into her phone, dragging herself down the hall in a haze, or letting out her frustration in a barely muffled scream—she has the rare ability to seem at once psychologically stripped and physically rejuvenated by the relentless scrutiny of the camera. (Director of photography Christopher Messina shot much of the film in close-up.) In some of Byrne’s most memorable big-screen roles — as a rich, spoiled queen bee in “Bridesmaids” (2011) and an arrogant Bulgarian arms dealer in “Spy” (2015) — she provided a natural comedic villain, a smug, hyper-competent rival to an incompetent heroine. “If I Had Two Legs I’d Kick You” flips that scenario in an inspiring way. Here, Linda is the stutterer, or so everyone around her thinks.
As in “The Lost Daughter,” the beach beckons powerfully. If I Had Legs to Kick You is set in Montauk, and the water seems to exert an almost gravitational influence on Linda’s psyche, as if the raging sea currents were part of its currents. Also like Nightbitch, Bronstein’s film has a night terror element: Linda doesn’t turn into a dog, but when she wanders the neighborhood after dark, her demons feel fully unleashed. The delineation of day and night is so stark that her adventures, at times, take on an almost vampiric quality: when the sun rises, she appears exhausted, trapped, and unable to move due to her agenda. After nightfall, at least, while her baby is sleeping, she can sneak out for a bottle of wine, a puff of herbs, or something stronger. She tries to get the latter with the help of the hotel supervisor, James, with whom she forms a wacky, unpredictable, and often combative friendship. (James plays rapper A$AP Rocky, in his second strong performance of the year, following Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.”) These are escaped pleasures, but for Linda, they are a crucial respite. It allows her to convince herself, if only for an hour or two, that she still has some semblance of a life of her own.
When “If I Had Two Legs I’d Kick You” premiered earlier this year at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals, its nonstop, panic-attack aesthetic sparked critical evocations of brothers Josh and Benny Safdie, whose films, such as “Daddy Longlegs” (2009) and “Good Time” (2017), especially made “Uncut Gems” (2019), a similarly exhausting watch. The comparisons were logical. Bronstein is married to director, editor and actor Ronald Bronstein, who has worked on the Safdies films in various capacities and served as one of the producers of If I Had Two Legs I Would Kick You. Although it may be unwise to assume a web of familial influences, it’s hard to avoid them here, especially in the case of a film that’s particularly attuned to the nuances of marital give-and-take.
From scene to scene, If I Had Two Legs I’d Kick You can seem so formally aggressive, almost aggressive, that it takes a moment to appreciate that it’s also a film of strategic omissions and structured absences. Linda’s daughter is never identified by name, and is often heard of but rarely seen. In Bronstein’s most extreme formal maneuver, the child’s face is carefully hidden from view, in every shot but one. Instead, the girl is stripped down to various body parts: a pair of legs dangling from the toilet, or a belly from which a feeding tube protrudes – an image that underscores her almost secret dependence on Linda. At night, the girl is caught up in a cacophony of noises: the humming and whirring sounds of the machine that connects to her while she sleeps, or the whining and snoring of the baby monitor Linda carries during her long after-dark walks. When she wakes, Linda’s daughter is a voice, a very active and lively voice, forever laughing, chattering, demanding, raising a storm. Hiding the daughter’s face is a frank but effective representation of one of Bronstein’s central ideas: how the people we love can drain us to the point that we no longer see them for what they are.