If I Had Legs kvetches relentlessly.
Actress Rose Byrne transforms herself into the ultimate Karen in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, a film that goes from psycho-comedy to psychodrama. She plays Linda, a psychologist going through the hell of other people putting demands on her — including an ailing child, an absent husband, a neglectful landlord, and her own shrink (played by Conan O’Brien), who can’t keep up with Linda’s kvetching.
Byrne’s thin-faced Linda is shrill, quick-witted, angry, and more than a little mad. It’s possible that the daughter who is bulimic and hooked to a colostomy bag that Linda must empty on schedule is not real, merely a figment of Linda’s imagination. But writer-director Mary Bronstein cleverly makes this annoying figure into Linda’s straight man. Linda/Karen’s complaints and the daughter’s nagging are an ongoing Frick and Frack comedy routine.
The daughter is never seen, but we hear her childish whining, which triggers Linda’s annoyance. Linda’s impatience increases along with her troubles — the ceiling in her apartment collapses, going through her bedroom floor, and she is haunted by the spooky, dripping vacuum above and the yonic crater below. It’s a self-twisting symbol of a woman’s monthly complaint. Byrne’s performance dares put the inside of post-feminist frustration on the outside. She shows us what enraged feminists fantasize is not obvious ever since the pink-pussycat contingent Madonna encouraged at the 2017 presidential inauguration (an elegy for the hopes that Hillary Clinton represented for power-hungry gals).
Byrne’s quick-witted frustration with the mother-and-child nurture-and-tolerance exchange is almost as hilariously true to life as the on-the-road scenes of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Witness Byrne’s snappish defensiveness with other women: a surly hotel clerk, a desperate patient who abandons her own child (Danielle Macdonald), or Dr. Spring (Bronstein herself), who leads the support group for mothers of infirm children. Dr. Spring tells Linda to avoid the “thinking trap” of feeling guilty for situations she cannot control. (“It’s not my fault” is the support group’s motto, decorated on the icing of a refreshment buffet cake.)
But it’s not for the depth of her performance that Byrne is winning critics’ accolades; reviewers are rewarding her characterization for its ultimate victimhood. Linda is a reflection of the narcissism that those in the reviewing sisterhood admire. Linda’s commitment to psychotherapy is a class marker; the dissatisfaction that makes her constantly at odds with others comes from rejecting the spirituality that Freudian logic replaced.
Bronstein half-satirizes this condition (through the same gaping cavity that occurs in the Marty Supreme script by her husband, Ronald Bronstein) then flips to grim sentimentality — the twilight zone when Linda contemplates suicide. Last year’s Nightbitch offered a similar whine fest (and a conventionally good performance from Amy Adams), but Bronstein’s combination of comedy and dread differs from Marielle Heller’s feminist analysis in Nightbitch. The Bronsteins’ approach congratulates Millennial alienation as Gen Z entitlement. Feminist resentment is the point of the misleading title, which signals that female agency is desired at the same time it’s considered an affliction. Linda’s regret about abortion, shifting into surprise misery, is the key to the film’s hidden self-loathing.
This isn’t a great characterization, merely a type that middle-class reviewers identify with. The Bronsteins see life as a stand-up comedy routine — not a sensitive approach to the human condition, such as we see from director James Sweeney in Straight Up and Twinless — emphasizing the interior monologue of a shameless narcissist. The Bronsteins see self-awareness as something to be avoided, as Linda does in her perpetual panic; they regard thinking and responsibility — and parenthood — as a trap.
