If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (2025)

Rated R and justifiably so.  The most obvious read of this is how bleak the movie gets.  I know that shouldn't be a reason that a movie is rated R, but if you watch it, you'd kind of get where I'm going with this.  This movie is meant to upset you to the core.  It's a little bit of a torture film, only the torture is almost all emotional.  There's a lot of drinking and drug use in the film.  The characters are almost constantly swearing.  Someone gets a compound fracture and it shows.  It's a lot all the way through.

DIRECTOR:  Mary Bronstein

I'm writing against the clock.  I meant to get a lot written last week, but Weebly died and now I'm stuck playing a lot of catchup.  I have three movies to write about and one hour to do it.  I am quite aware that this is an impossible task. But if I can get this blog out there, at least I won't feel bad about myself.

Most of the time, when I watch movies where the only reason that I'm watching the movie is for a performance, I'm usually confused why the film wasn't nominated as well.  This one I kind of get.  Rose Byrne absolutely destroys in this piece.  Honestly, tour de force acting performance.  Considering that Byrne traditionally has comedic chops involved in her better performances, watching her know exactly how much to push for the camera is incredible.  This is a performance that is sadistically comedic.  There are moments when you laugh, but not because something is traditionally funny.  It's almost shocking how rough things go for Linda.  A lot of that comes from a woman dealing with burnout making incredibly poor choices.  But also, the world is so unfair to her that it almost becomes comic, which is a real dark laugh to have by the way.  I think we're all aware that we shouldn't be laughing at a mother taking care of a daughter who is dying of an eating disorder.  But A24 keeps piling on the crap all the time and, at one point, you find yourself laughing rather than crying.  And a lot of that actual artistic satisfaction comes from Byrne herself.  I get her nom and why the movie wasn't nominated for anything else besides this point.

It's not like the movie is full-on bad.  I am mostly glad that I watched it.  To quote Doctor Who, "Sad is happy for deep people."  I don't necessarily hate sad things.  If anything, I've been accused of the opposite.  I often find myself crapping on things that are too joyful because I want to feel a healthy dose of misery when I absorb entertainment.  (Oddly enough, I'm really enjoying Song Sung Blue, so the world is all topsy-turvy right now.)   It's just that A24 tends to get in its own way more and more.  I've been kind of feeling this for a lot of the A24 entries.  I don't know if there's a big voice at A24 who keeps putting the same motifs into each entry that it releases.  But someone there is really embracing a sense of existential dread and wants to make the visuals match that sense of impending doom.  I don't think I need a better example of something being aggressively A24 like the hole in Linda's ceiling that keeps drawing her back.  Golly, it almost feels like Neon is making fun of A24 with that hole in the ceiling.  

But here's me, trying to find a justification for all of the hole stuff.  The hole thing would be catastrophic for any family.  It's a violation of a safe space.  The movie has to throw these characters without a community into a space that is incredibly toxic for them.  The hole represents what is keeping them from a sense of normality.   (I oddly don't actually believe this analysis because it seems like Linda has been self-sabotaging from moment one.) But the thing about the hole is that it is a different problem than what she has with her daughter.  Her daughter is  a problem that is sucking up all of Linda's investment.  Everything that she does is an attempt to give her daughter a normal life, but that eating disorder doesn't allow her to have that normal life.  The hole, as much as it sucks, is a problem that can be solved.  It can be solved as long as you are able to give it proper focus and attention.  Yeah, when Linda looks into that hole, she sees the overwhelming scope of the universe.  It's a hole apparently built on lies (an idea that I'm still struggling to wrap my head around).   It hurts people like Jamie, who underestimate how dangerous the hole really is.  But all of this reading feels more like an A24 addition.  It's something ominous and normal.  I'm sure that it messes with people who have that phobia of holes.  Honestly, the visual associations with the hole in the ceiling are cool, but I feel like I've seen this before in A24 films.  Yeah, there's a glorious misery that comes when Charles gets the hole fixed because he's a man and men only listen to other men.  But it's something that is a bit forced in a sotry that may or may not need it.  (Basically, I'm accidentally arguing whether or not this film needs to be as artsy as it is.) 

What's really frustrating about this movie is the scope of performance quality.  As I stated, Rose Byrne is divine in this movie.  No notes.  Crushes it.  I'm also going to give points to Conan O'Brien and A$AP Rocky.  Both of them are incredible performers.  The thing that drove me nuts (and I feel like a real heel for saying this) is the daughter and Christian Slater.  I'm mostly talking about the voices.  One of the slightly gimmicky things about If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is that Linda's family is rarely shown on screen.  I think a lot of that has to do with creating a sense of isolation about this woman.  Also, we want this story to be about Linda and not about her daughter, so showing Linda's investment in this treatment is paramount.  But maybe it's the VO element of it all, but these characters are frustrating.  Let me be clear, I think that annoyance is built into the film.  We're supposed to be annoyed with Linda's daughter because Linda is annoyed with her own daughter.  That madness that is building up comes from the shrillness of her daughter constantly asking for more help and making poor choices.  If we spent the movie feeling sympathy for this character, the film wouldn't make a lot of sense.  

But the voices kept on pulling me out, especially considering that Byrne's performance is so grounded.  Like, she was having appropriate reactions to just the most over-the-top prompts.  Her child was shrill.  Charles was abusive and lacked even the most rudimentary elements of sympathy.  Maybe this is all because we absorb all of these characters through the filter of Linda, who is a walking case of burnout.  The problem is that, when you are watching the movie, you are also getting stressed out.  There becomes a point where this is all un-fun.  Yeah, you are laughing, but you are only combatting any vulnerability because you can only take so much bleakness before it has no impact.

My bigger question is "Why is everyone so mean to Linda?"  I get it.  Linda probably isn't the easiest person to get along with.  She is a husk of a human being after going through all this stuff.  (I just remembered the hamster stuff.) Again, I keep repeating myself (thus am angry at this blog entry), but we're seeing things through Linda's eyes.  I have to guess that she's an unreliable narrator because I refuse to believe that everyone is as aggressive with her as the film projects.  I'm actually surprised that she isn't more frustrated with everyone treating her as if she's fragile.  But no one treats her at all nicely.  Let's use her daughter's doctor as an example.  Dr. Spring is hostile with her.  Maybe she's using her big voice to snap Linda out of whatever haze she's in.  Maybe she needs Linda to step up and make better choices.  I'm sure that's part of being a medical professional.  It might not be all rainbows and calm words.  But it feels like Dr. Spring isn't ready for anything that Linda is throwing down.  There's a part where Linda  finally makes one of the group therapy sessions that Dr. Spring has been pushing for the bulk of the film.  Instead of ever positively reinforcing Linda for making the attempt, Spring feels flummoxed by Linda's combativeness.  If anything, as challenging as Linda is, what Linda attacks Spring with is pretty tee-ball worthy stuff.  She says that she does feel guilty for what happened to her daughter and supposes that the other women in the room also feel that way.  Why isn't Spring ready for that?  Instead, it makes it look like Linda is the one who is out of line when she's dealing with her daughter's deteriorating health.  

This attitude is consistent for almost every NPC in the story.  I love Conan's therapist character, but he's all over the place when it comes to reacting to Linda's needs.  That's a script thing, not a performance thing.  The only character that is even remotely a character with layers is Jamie, who tries his best to help a woman who is spiraling.  Yeah, he sucks at it because he has no investment in Linda.  But at least we see this character reacting to a woman hitting bottom with a modicum of compassion. Sure, that compassion involves Jamie trying to get her to buy drugs.  But as much as he's hustling her, he does seem to feel for her situation.  These are all bleak characters and it gets to be a bit much.

I want to like this movie so much more. I love elements of the movie a lot.  But good golly is A24 once again didn't get into their own way.  There's an incredible story and an incredible character study here.  But gut punch after gut punch only exhausts, not makes us sympathize.