'If I Had Legs I'd Kick You' is 'Beau Is Afraid' for Moms

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It’s a shame that the title “Holes” was already taken. Holes are at the root of the protagonist’s anxiety in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, starring Rose Byrne as “Linda” in the role I hope wins Byrne the Oscar. Byrne’s character has a hole in the ceiling of her Montauk apartment, a hole in the stomach of her elementary school-aged daughter, and both seem to be hosing floods of shit directly onto Byrne’s lap. Bronstein’s film plays like an extended panic attack, a gloriously niche neurotic fever dream that’s hilarious whenever it isn’t oppressively stressful. The way it mixes pathos and comedy, merging the mundane and the metaphysical, makes it feel a bit like Bronstein took Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid and reversed the polarity on “mommy issues.”

We first meet Byrne’s stressed out mom on the way home from the pizza place, as her unseen daughter is peppering her with questions — accusations, really —about why she didn’t get the pizza the way the daughter likes it, with no sauce and no cheese. I didn’t order it that way because they would’ve made fun of us and it would’ve been a whole thing, Byrne says astutely. The daughter is offscreen, and remains that way for most of the movie, which is shot mostly close in on Byrne’s face in the midst of some cacophony, almost like a daytime, comedic take on The Babadook, where every action feels somehow menacing. The daughter is both Byrne’s antagonist and her externalized internal monologue, their argument rising to a crescendo until the pizza box finally crashes, or is knocked, to the sidewalk and the cheese and sauce go splat on the roof of the box leaving the daughter a nice naked crust that she won’t eat much of anyway. Parenting, it do be like that sometimes.

Food has become fraught for Byrne’s character, who desperately needs her daughter to eat so that she can be taken off her feeding tube, which the daughter seems constitutionally incapable of doing on account of being very annoying. At times, the film feels a bit like a feature-length adaptation of the viral, “why don’t we ever question if the child has bad vibes?” tweet.

When she doesn’t eat, the specialist doctor (played by the film’s writer and director, Mary Bronstein) treats Byrne’s character like a bad mother. Every time the child doesn’t make weight as a result of her not eating, the doctor gets more passive-aggressive, and the wait to remove the daughter’s feeding tube only gets longer. This means Byrne is stuck feeding nutritional sludge into a dangling plastic bag, and monitoring the beeping machine that pumps it into her daughter’s stomach beginning at 8 pm every evening. The task becomes all the more onerous after a giant hole opens up in the ceiling of their apartment, spilling yet more semi-digested goo everywhere and banishing Byrne and her obnoxious sickly daughter to a crappy motel room. Now if she wants any peace at all, Byrne has to leave her daughter alone for midnight skid row strolls, dodging townies while listening to the machine on a baby monitor. The famous scowling unibrow girl (Ivy Wolk) plays the motel’s evil night manager. A$AP Rocky shows up as Byrne’s affable drugs connect and psuedo confidante. As I noted in my Highest 2 Lowest review, Rocky can really act, even more so now that he’s not saddled with a bad movie.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, which doesn’t actually feature any legless characters, is said to have been inspired by Bronstein having to care for her own daughter during an extended illness at a motel in San Diego, while her husband, frequent Safdie collaborator and brilliant screenwriter in his own right, Ronald Bronstein (Heaven Knows What, Good Time, Uncut Gems) was in New York working on Good Time. I probably could’ve surmised a semi-autobiographical angle, so specific is If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but the niche nature of Byrne’s twin traumas is narratively appropriate. The worst part of most parental and marital stressors is that they’re so petty and mundane, so cumulative in their effect and multi-layered in their causes, that even if you had someone to explain them to you wouldn’t be able to do it justice. It’s just one no-sauce-and-no-cheese pizza after another. Let’s not get into a whole thing about it! Byrne’s character, who is a therapist herself, has a therapist of her own, played by a brilliantly stunt-cast Conan O’Brien, whose main attribute is being even more exhausted by Byrne’s shit than she is.

Watching two hours of claustrophobic footage of an overworked mom having a panic attack isn’t normally my idea of a good time, but there’s also no actor on Earth more capable of turning exasperated reaction shots into high comedy than Rose Byrne. The depth of emotion the woman can pack into a single eye roll is simply stunning. It’s funny to think that the first time I bothered learning the name “Rose Byrne” was when she played the straight woman in Bridesmaids—funny partly because Byrne is as comedically gifted as any of the other castmembers, and partly because she has two entire pages of IMDB credits before that.

Aside from Nicole Kidman, who scientists say may die if she ever does fewer than two movies and three shows per year, Rose Byrne is the only A-lister who works as often as Eric Roberts. Through it all, she seems only to get better. She has John C. Reilly’s range with lead actor looks. My guess is that Byrne will still have to play a queen or a tragic 20th century actress before the Academy recognizes her, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You at least serves notice that she deserves to be in the conversation.