If I had Legs I’d Kick You – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Mary Bronstein
Writer – Mary Bronstein
Stars – Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald

A two-hour exercise in watching the overwhelming anxiety experienced by others is perhaps one way of dealing with the anxiety in our own everyday lives. The challenges confronting others can make our worries seem minor.  Here, the frazzled mother heroine, Linda (Rose Byrne), of this headlong dive into a whirlwind of demanding issues takes us on an intense journey through the tasks and vicissitudes of coping alone.  An absent husband presumes to dispense unwelcome advice and regular reprimands.  He hasn’t the slightest clue or understanding of what is happening on the home front.  Dropping his calls and cutting him off, his still loyal wife is being sucked day by day into a hellish vortex.  She is not experiencing a war or nuclear catastrophe but an accretion of issues: home, children, work colleagues, life itself, all becoming impossible.

The main domestic worry is an already ill child (Delaney Quinn) who refuses to eat and may have other issues, and provides a constant background of whining and nagging demands.  She is intensely irritating.  We can add to this bureaucratic hospital staff,  an over-zealous carpark attendant, a collapsing house, a snarling motel receptionist, among other challenges.  Meanwhile, irony of ironies, and not without cinematic precedent, she is herself a counsellor/psychologist – dispensing advice while ignoring the same advice when offered to her by a long-suffering Therapist (Conan O’Brien). It should be said that she is dispensing advice when she is half stoned and/or hungover.  She wants, at times, to kill her child, or so it seems, and seeks solace in too much wine, dope, and the potential thrill/risk of seducing a handsome, personable Motel neighbour.  It is all fast-paced and exhausting – that head in a liquidiser feeling.  The laughs when they come provide welcome relief, but here too they are not jokes of some wise-cracking Groucho Marx.  Instead, they are laughs of irony, or the sort we may feel at a sombre funeral and have that sense of one simply having to laugh at it all or be swamped entirely. Tough enough for the viewer but leaving us to imagine – all too believably  – the plight of women in this career, work-life balance silo.

There are many vehicles on television and film which explore the frustrations of life.  Victor Meldrew (Richard Wilson), exclaiming “ I don’t believe it!” in the long-running One Foot in the Grave (1990-2001), had many fans, who empathised. Almodóvar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) pressed some of the same buttons, while Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake (2016) was a very serious and concerned take on the shortcomings of the social welfare system.  This is less worthy, and there is a whiff of redeeming irony throughout. What is also notable throughout, actually the most notable fact, is a singular performance of extraordinary skill and accomplishment, seldom rivalled on screen and worthy of any number of accolades.