Early this morning Slate ‘s Dana Stevens urged readers to consider Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme and Mary Bronte’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in the same light — as two peas in a pod, in fact — linked as they are by the same producer, Ronald Bronstein, who is also Mary’s husband**.
But of course! Except for the fact that Marty Supreme is a hyper, adrenalized, globe-hopping, pogo-stick contact high and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a miserable, claustrophobic, feminist-minded, self-loathing agony slog that only XX-chromosome celebrationists like Kristi Coulter could possibly “enjoy”, they’re almost exactly the same film. Certainly!
Supreme–ala made me want to bop-the-rock with a hubba-hubba Chalamet while going down on Gwyneth Paltrow in Central Park and throb-dancing to Tears for Fears and going “hoo-hoo!” like Daffy Duck. If I Had Legs ignited thoughts of overdosing on Oxy while stabbing myself in the throat with a steak knife. Yeaaahhh!
** Ronald and Mary have a daughter, live in fucking White Plains.
Posted on 10.10.25, it was called “Another Exercise in Mute Nostril Agony.”
Mary Bronstein and Rose Byrne’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is about miserable, gloomed-out Linda (Byrne), a weary, facially-lined, stressed-out, emotionally and psychologically gutted therapist and struggling mother of a young ailing daughter (heard but unseen until the very end)…
Call her a 40ish woman under siege…anguished to a fare-thee-well and at her absolute wit’s end…a victim of a tortured, infuriating, harrowing, one-urban-indignity-after-another gauntlet that — surprise! — assaults and saps the life force out of the audience as much as Linda if not more so.
Within the first five minutes I was telling myself “you’re not going to last through this whole thing”. But I decided I would tough it out, dammit, for at least an hour. Which I did. It was agony and I was checking my watch every ten minutes, but I made it!
In Jeannette Catsoulis ‘s N.Y Times review (10.9), she calls If I Had Legs “wrenching and at times suffocating”, as well as “a horror movie…a howling maternal desperation spiked with jagged humor”.
There is no humor-spiking at any point in this film, trust me. Zero.
Catsoulis also writes that “some viewers could find the movie’s relentlessness exhausting“.
Famous Steve Martin line in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (‘88), spoken to John Candy: “Do ya think so?”