This is the role of a lifetime, and Rose Byrne embraces it with everything she’s got

3 months ago 10

FILM
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You ★★★½
(M) 113 minutes

Motherhood is a minefield. This idea is currently in vogue among certain female filmmakers. In Die My Love, British director Lynne Ramsay has Jennifer Lawrence undergo an emotional implosion under the pressure of marriage to a man who leaves all the parenting to her. And in Mary Bornstein’s new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Rose Byrne is in a similarly distraught state.

A$AP Rocky, left, and Rose Byrne in a scene from If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.

For most of the film her husband Charles (Christian Slater) is just a voice on the telephone, nagging her with demands that she get a grip and soldier on.

Bornstein came to the screen in 2008 via the “mumblecore movement”, a variety of low-budget independent cinema which focused on the day-to-day alarms and irritations of self-absorbed 20-somethings. Seventeen years later, her concentration is as intense as ever.

Her camera subjects Byrne to close-ups so intrusive that we find ourselves examining her face’s every pore. The miracle is that such scrutiny does nothing to diminish her talent for comedy.

Nobody likes to be called long-suffering, a word which suggests a particularly self-righteous form of martyrdom. But Byrne has always invested it with a different meaning. Her version of long-suffering is edged with a humorous yet innocent air of caution – as if she’s habitually resigned to the probability that disaster is lurking around the next corner.

Conan O’Brien plays Linda’s therapist in the film.

At the outset of the film, however, Byrne’s Linda is convinced that the worst has already happened. Her young daughter has been diagnosed with a mysterious disease which has robbed her of any desire to eat and the doctor in charge of her treatment – played by Bornstein herself – has mastered the art of making Linda feel guilty while pretending that she’s doing no such thing.

Then the ceiling falls in – literally. Linda and her daughter arrive home from the clinic to find that their apartment is flooded and a deluge is pouring through a gaping hole above them. Narrowly escaping drowning, they retreat to a sleazy motel. As they wait for the damage to be repaired, the hole grows in Linda’s mind to become a nightmarish metaphor for all that’s gone wrong in her life.

The story is partly autobiographical – drawn from Bornstein’s ordeal during an illness suffered by her own daughter, together with her experiences as a psychotherapist working in hospitals. Linda, too, is a psychotherapist, a fact which only serves to amplify the satire as she tries to deal with her patients while looking for help from her own therapist, played with an eye-rolling display of indifference by the talk show host Conan O’Brien.

Bornstein’s script is built on the comedy of exaggeration pushed to such extremes that supposedly ordinary incidents inevitably lead to disaster. In Die My Love, Lawrence is tormented by a yappy dog that her misguided husband brings home as a gift, but this animal doesn’t begin to compete with the malevolent hamster that Linda takes into her care after giving in to her daughter’s desire for a pet.

The only sympathetic character in her life is the rapper A$AP Rocky, cast as the superintendent of the motel where she’s staying. He has a drugs supply which provides her with a little temporary relief but by this point, her relationship with reality is so tenuous that events are taking on the hallucinatory nature of a horror movie.

I can’t say that these switches in tone are entirely successful. Bornstein puts you on an unnerving and slightly mystifying rollercoaster ride which has you gasping for air, but she has certainly served Byrne well. It’s the role of a lifetime and Byrne embraces it with everything she’s got.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is in cinemas from November 13.

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