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?”