Rose Byrne gives us an emotionally charged, no-holds barred performance as Linda in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. It's obvious from the first scene that Linda is running on fumes - she's drained of energy and running in circles. She feels invisible. And then the roof falls in. Literally. A giant piece of her bedroom ceiling, along with a torrent of water, collapses into her home, leaving a gaping, bizarre, somewhat mystical hole above the bed, while also flooding the unit. So Linda and her daughter relocate to an unnamed beachside hotel in an anonymous city, to await reconstruction.
Linda is a professional therapist, in dire need of therapy for herself. She listens to others, yet no one in her life listens to her. "You're not listening to me" is Linda's oft-repeated statement. She's surrounded by people who ignore her. The therapist/associate she sees semi-professionally (Conan O'Brien) has so removed himself from caring about her feelings that he isn't given a name in the film. He shuts the door on her face. There are hints of a shared past, an unprofessional personal relationship. Now he is not even pretending to listen to her. He's frequently antagonistic and is extremely unlikeable.
Her daughter (Delaney Quinn), also nameless, but we'll call 'Child', lives with a chronic medical condition. Child has a feeding tube inserted in her stomach and sleeps hooked to an ever-beeping monitor. Child's face is never seen; we only get glimpses of her ear, toes, stomach and the back of her head. Yet she's heard constantly. Always anxious, whining about everything and never listening to what Linda tells her to do. The audience definitely wishes Linda would stop deferring to Child; it becomes exhausting and makes Linda look even more invisible. Linda is also consumed with guilt about Child's condition. "It's my fault" is Linda's self-diagnosis. Maybe it's because she was present when Child's tube was first inserted, and, as her mother, as well as the continual 'victim' of other people's misbehavior toward her, this is how Linda views herself. 'Everything is my fault. I am invisible'.
Mary Bronstein performs triple duty in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Not only is she Child's physician, Dr. Spring, she is also the film's writer/Director. Dr. Spring certainly doesn't listen to Linda, especially about the feeding tube. Linda wants to remove it to see if Child will eat on her own; Dr. Spring won't even discuss it, pushing Linda's anxiety into overdrive. "Maybe I doesn't know what's best for my own daughter." More self-doubt.
The disembodied yet umistakeable voice of Christian Slater is Linda's husband, Charles. He's MIA from the marriage, probably for a very long time. He's in the military, but doesn't seem to be enlisting in anything more pressing than choosing to avoid his family and berate Linda at every opportunity. He's literally phoning it in; Linda frequently hangs up on him and then apologizes. Self-loathing.
Linda has patients who enlist her services as a therapist. Occassionally they DO listen to her, but only to nurture their own delusional behaviors. One of them physically disappears during a session, abandoning her toddler with Linda. Even the woman at the hotel's mini mart ignores her when she goes in to purchase some wine. The only person who pays any sort of attention to her is James (A$AP Rocky), her hotel neighbor. He sees her, maybe the first person in a long time who does so. He listens to her. His performance provides some needed comic relief in the film, and gives Linda a semi-sane person to relate to.
If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is populated with many intentionally unlikeable characters. Bronstein explores how women can unintentionally become invisible even to themselves, losing who they are while trying to accommodate everyone else's demands. Yet she bookends her film with images of water drenching our soul-drowned protagonist, clearly symbolizing Linda's need for an emotional cleansing. The washing away of years of mental sludge buildup. There is also an unmistakeable analogy between the hole in the ceiling and Child's stoma; dealing with each further debilitates Linda to the point of inaction.
Though I enjoyed the film for the most part, I believe with one change, the film could have been truly remarkable. That change - eliminate the physical character of Child. You rarely see her, you only hear her. If you see the film, consider this option: Child no longer exists. She has already passed away. Yet the audience doesn't know that till the end. The character now lives solely in Linda's ragged mind. In that case, Byrne's performance, and the film, would have been mind-blowing. With so much of the film steeped in anonymity, with invisibility, it would have made the plot all the more unforgettable. A different take on "I see dead people", and we know how influential, movie-wise, that reveal was for Bruce Willis and Director M. Knight Shyamalan.
