If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
I am going through a rough patch at the moment.
Work developments have left me with a lot of free time and a lot of thoughts.
I hear watching movies can be relaxing. Let’s put this charming Rose Byrne comedy in the VCR.
Holy potatoes!
What an intense movie!
I had heard a few things about it, which made me go in expecting something like Uncut Gems. Turns out the movies are somewhat connected.
A panic-attack in film form, If I had Legs I’d Kick you is the story of a mother (nameless, played by Rose Byrne) at the brink (maybe over the brink?) of collapse.
An aways off-camera daughter with a sickness requiring constant attention, an absent husband that seems to be just adding pressure, a therapist (played curiously by Conan O’Brien) that seems more interested in psychological manipulation rather than anything else, and a world that just hates this woman.
We are always seeing things from her eyes.
Every person hates her. Every problem is insurmountable.
No break is long enough or even relaxing enough.
Rose Byrne wonderfuly conveys a woman that just cannot take it any longer.
Audiovisually the movie is a frenetic, anxiety-inducing affair. Masterfully done. The audio particularly creates a wall of constant oppression. The daughter’s background complaints, medical machines beeping, unreasonable parking attendants tapping on windows.
Like the main character, you feel that there is not a minute of breathing space to relax.
I just wanted to hug her and buy her a weekend at a spa.
Watching the movie I was kinda reminded of two other stories.
One, was The Florida Project .
The dingy motel setting, the mother-daughter relationship.
The feeling of fighting an unfair battle.
While in The Florida Project keeps us as a fly on the wall, allowing us to make our own mind on where society’s fault starts and individual responsibility ends, If I Had Leg’s I’d Kick You throws us in the middle of a crisis, the reasons and causes left for us to ruminate on.
In a weirder way, this second thing this movie made me think of was Silent Hill.
A protagonist so deep in their own mental quagmire, we see reality entirely from their eyes.
Are the problems she faces as bad as they seem to her?
Is everyone really out to get her?
Is that fleshy, gaping wound hole on her ceiling really as nightmarish as she sees it?
We are always behind Rose Byrne’s eyes, so the same way she cannot tell, we can’t also.
Movies can transport us to places. Physical places or mental places. They can show us somethng that might not even exist.
This movie does not take us to a beautiful place, but it is a worthy ride.
There are HOLES everyone. They are never gone.
