When Mary Bronstein’s daughter was seven years old, she became sick. At the time, the writer-director had no choice but to travel from New York to San Diego — the only place where her daughter could get the necessary long-term treatment. While Bronstein’s husband (director and screenwriter Ronald Bronstein) remained back in New York, she and her daughter took up residence in a tiny, austere motel room. Doctors told her treatment would take six weeks — eight, max. But as two months stretched into eight, Bronstein felt herself slipping.
“I’d be in this motel room, in bed, staring at the ceiling,” Bronstein tells Rolling Stone on a call from her home in New York. “I started going into the bathroom and closing the door, and that’s where I could have my space at night, which was quite depressing. I’m sitting on the tiles, and I would be drinking $10 wine and binge eating a lot of Jack in the Box, candy, Stouffer’s microwave meals. I felt I was having an existential crisis. I was disappearing into the task at hand.”
As she (quite literally) sat with her feelings, Bronstein also started to write with a singular goal: “I must figure out a way to express this feeling in cinematic language.” After eight years of negotiating with studios to keep her initial vision unchanged, the result is A24’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the follow-up to Bronstein’s 2008 mumblecore film Yeast starring onetime genre staple Greta Gerwig. A Lynchian mashup of styles from horror and surrealist experimental to drama and dark comedy, If I Had Legs is a mind-boggle of a film that refuses to be categorized or let the audience look away from its unravelling protagonist.
Starring a brilliant Rose Byrne as Linda, If I Had Legs mirrors Bronstein’s caretaking experience and builds it out with even more mayhem. Byrne’s onscreen daughter (a heard but not seen Delaney Quinn) suffers from an unnamed gastrointestinal illness and requires a feeding tube. Meanwhile, mother and daughter are holed up in a dilapidated motel after their apartment floods. Linda’s husband (voiced by Christian Slater) is out of town for work and can only seem to focus on how stressed out he is. Linda’s therapist (an antipathetic Conan O’Brien, whom Bronstein calls “the mensch of mensches”) is visibly irritated during their sessions. And Linda, who is also a therapist herself, can’t seem to offer any genuine empathy for her own patients.
Linda’s only break from reality comes at night, as she sits outside the motel chugging cheap wine and clutching her daughter’s feeding pump monitor. She becomes friendly with motel super James (A$AP Rocky), who, possibly to his detriment, seems like the only person interested in helping.
“There is a truly an anti-authority streak and a sense of entitlement in Linda that I think is profound, curious, and interesting,” Byrne tells Rolling Stone. “She’s kind of an agent of chaos in many ways.” Indeed, even when Linda attempts to solve a problem, it tends to blow up in her face. In one of the film’s most madcap and darkly comedic moments, Linda bribes her daughter with the promise of a pet hamster — who turns out to be a biter, desperate to escape its box. As Linda literally fights with the rodent in the car (with her shrieking daughter in the backseat), it gets flung out the window and becomes roadkill. (It’s a puppet; no actual hamsters were harmed in the making of If I Had Legs.)
Byrne was at the top of Bronstein’s list to play Linda, a role requiring someone who could balance raw, dramatic emotion with a bit of humor. “I was also thinking, ‘I need somebody who, when they come onscreen, the audience, even if it’s at a subconscious level, has goodwill towards,’” Bronstein says. “There’s lots of actresses who [can play both drama and comedy] who, for some reason, [the audience has] decided that they didn’t like. That would make telling the story harder, because the audience wouldn’t go as far with me.”
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Byrne was immediately intrigued by Bronstein’s screenplay. “Mary just lit the page on fire when she wrote this script,” she says. “It was so visually and emotionally expressive. There was so much humor. [I was] putting the script down and gasping, ‘Oh, my goodness, oh no, oh gosh’ and thinking, where would one begin? Who is this character? Instead of reverse engineering to see how this person ended up where the audience meets her, because there’s no hand-holding to explain this character, it was about peeling back that onion with Mary and discovering who Linda was before this crisis — because everyone’s going to respond differently.”
To emphasize Linda’s splintering psyche, Bronstein took a few wild swings. For instance, in lieu of a score, If I Had Legs fills each scene with an ambient swirl of anxiety-inducing sounds, from the incessant beep of the feeding machine to urgent calls and iPhone notifications and even the daughter’s high-pitched whine. In addition, much of If I Had Legs is shot in an unorthodox series of extreme close-ups, so Byrne’s face constantly fills the frame. “People [in the film] are seeing her, but they’re not seeing her,” Bronstein explains. “It’s me saying to the audience: Look at this woman and acknowledge her pain. You’re going to deal with it.”
“It’s really radical what Mary made, and it’s radical what she asks the audience to experience,” Byrne says. “The things she says out loud, it’s not comfortable, it’s not what people necessarily want to hear. There’s shame around those feelings in motherhood of disappointment or boredom or failure. Mothers are simultaneously revered and ignored in many ways. One of my best friends saw the film recently, and she was like, ‘I feel seen. I usually feel so invisible.’”
As much as If I Had Legs is about society’s resistance to acknowledging a woman in distress, Bronstein believes it also says something universal about the isolation anyone can experience when in crisis. “As women, we know that feeling deeply,” she says. “But I think that everybody has had that experience where it’s like, ‘I’m in turmoil. Why is the world just going on normally, as if the universe is not crashing in on me?’
“I wanted to do that because, in our culture, there’s nothing more uncomfortable than a woman that’s upset,” Bronstein continues. “Because it looks bottomless and endless, and because that’s how it feels, nobody knows what to do.”
The result, as Byrne puts it: “It’s a really punk-rock take on motherhood.”
From Rolling Stone US
