Rose Byrne laughs when it is suggested that her new film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is maybe even scarier than that horror, the-devil-is-in-the-child classic The Exorcist for its portrayal of a kid in a peril. In writer/director Mary Bronstein’s vision, written in reaction to a family crisis of her own, it is an overwhelmed mother double-teaming with an intractable medical condition that has placed a little girl in such dire straits.
“The screenplay was extraordinary,” Byrne says in conversation during a Bay Area visit to receive the Mill Valley Film Festival‘s Mind the Gap award, given to women in film. “It was visually descriptive, particularly with its more existential ideas, more Lynchian language.”
“It was so unpredictable a screenplay and also very funny,” she continues. “I couldn’t believe I was reading it and that this opportunity had come to me. It was an extraordinary thing to try to peel back the onion of this character. I was just obsessed with reverse engineering who this character was before. Everyone’s going to respond differently to a crisis. That was a huge conversation Mary and I had of trying to figure that out.”
Byrne, the Australian actor who earned two Emmy nominations for her work as an ethically compromised attorney in the legal thriller Damages and displayed her comic chops in the screwball comedy Bridesmaids, won the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for her performance in If I Had Legs. A mother herself of two children with partner Bobby Cannavale, she plays Linda, a therapist with a young daughter tethered to a feeding tube, treatment for an unnamed eating disorder.
Things aren’t going well. The little girl is missing her weight goals and her caregivers talk ominously about next steps. Linda is having trouble maintaining objectivity when treating patients, particularly one struggling young mother. Linda’s own therapist (Conan O’Brien) is growing hostile. And she is increasingly checked out. It’s always wine o’clock somewhere.
“Linda doesn’t respond well to authority,” Byrne says. “I think she would have been the liveliest guest as a dinner party. She doesn’t like being put into a role or being told what to do. We tried to give hints of that past, of a character who has gotten stuck and lost her identity. She doesn’t have any friends or a true reflection or sounding board, someone to call her out on her behavior. She’s isolated herself so much. That performance was just a tightrope.”
Linda is not a single mother, but her husband—played by Christian Slater as a disembodied voice over the phone—is working out of town. We don’t see the child either, though we hear her plenty, pushing back on the idea of eating or whining for a pet hamster she is convinced will love her. The most present relationships in her life are with James (A$AP Rocky), a near-stranger and neighbor in the no-tell motel Linda’s insurance company has parked her and her daughter in while their home is being repaired. Of course, there’s also the link between her therapist—and that one oozes with resentment.
“The love story in the movie—though obviously it’s never physically transgressive—is between Linda and her therapist,” Byrne says. “She’s experiencing burnout as a therapist and transference with him as a therapist. It’s the bitter end of that relationship. She should not be practicing, and she should not be his patient.”
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“The therapist is a very studied character with a lot of rules and boundaries,” she adds. “He is not actively helping her at this point. He sort of has contempt for her. He is also a great wink to the audience—Conan spent 28 years sitting in a chair listening to people.”
Ultimately, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a movie about motherhood told from the perspective of a woman who is trying to cope with her life and a sick child with no real support. Byrne calls Bronstein “punk rock” for writing such an unvarnished depiction of Linda’s life, using her to illustrate how women are so often set up for failure by societal expectations. Linda is drowning, but everyone around her expects her to provide her own flotation device.
“Mary is saying to the audience, ‘I don’t care if you don’t like this, I don’t care if you don’t respond to this. This is the truth, and I’m going to call it out.’” Says Byrne. “It’s a very hard conversation to have around motherhood. People don’t want mothers to be disappointed or to be ashamed or to have feelings of failure. They don’t want that. Mary is examining the role of mothers as both revered and dismissed.”
Byrne and Bronstein interrogated every aspect of the screenplay in the weeks leading up to the production. They would sit at Bronstein’s kitchen table, going over every scene and every line for five weeks as Byrne became one with her character. She considers that time a gift, since it is rare to be able to study a script in such depth on a film. Byrne confesses she would have felt untethered without that prep work, which would have been a disservice not just to the film but to Linda.
“I always think of my job, in many ways, as a lawyer for the character,” she says. “I have to present the best case for this person. Linda had to make these choices because I’m not sure what she would have done otherwise. She made these choices because she had to. The audience doesn’t have to like Linda, but Mary and I had to love Linda. Whoever you’re playing, you have to present their best case, put their best case forward in a court of law.”
IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU is playing in Bay Area theaters.
