In the opening scene of Mary Bronstein’s electrifying new film, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the chameleonic actress Rose Byrne tries without success to convince a family counselor that she is not the problem. “Daddy is hard … Mommy is stretchable,” her daughter, who lurks offscreen, tells the therapist. “I’m not,” Byrne’s Linda, whose name is only offered to us in the credits, insists. “I’m not stretchable.”
While the camera often shows Linda through the eyes of her child, Linda complains of feeling unseen. A working mom with a daughter who suffers from an unnamed illness that requires daily treatment and the use of a feeding machine, Linda seeks refuge in a motel after their apartment suffers from a freak accident. Her child — who is as elusive to the audience as she is to Linda — requires constant attention, the world is filled with assholes, and the only person who shows Linda or her daughter an ounce of true kindness is a motel handyman, played deftly by A$AP Rocky. Throughout the film — which clocks in at just under two hours but moves like a freight train — Linda repeatedly asks, with increasing force, why no one will help her. Spoiler alert: Assistance never comes. Not from her husband (who suggests she take advantage of the motel pool), nor from the therapist she sees daily, or the doctors who are assigned to treat her child, and definitely not from the parking-lot attendant who bullies her for idling in her car just to catch her breath. Linda is prickly and self-sabotaging, and I can’t defend every decision she makes in this film. But she’s also right: No matter how loud she shrieks, no one seems to register her pain.
What a good mother is and isn’t, and who gets to decide, is at the heart of both this film and the real-life events that inspired it. Years ago, Bronstein spent eight months living in a San Diego motel room with her daughter, who underwent medical treatment similar to Linda’s child in Legs. As she hid in the bathroom, binge-eating Jack in the Box and drinking cheap wine, the feeling that most overwhelmed her — and she insists that the film is an attempt to convey a feeling, not fact — was not her isolation or her powerlessness in the face of her child’s needs. Instead, it was the fear that she was disappearing into the task of making her child better. It was the “dread,” Bronstein explained to me, that her daughter “is gonna get better, and we are gonna go back to New York, and who the fuck am I?”
What does a mother need, exactly, in order to stop herself from disappearing into the often joyous but sometimes brutal work of caring for children? Certainly not what is on offer. As I watched Linda buck against the cookie-cutter parenting support offered in her daughter’s treatment program, I recalled sitting in a cold, overlit doctor’s office when my own son was a baby, fudging every item on the postpartum-depression questionnaire because I knew that the only thing more lonely than being at home with a child all day would be enduring the available interventions — medication, talk therapy, compassion — when what I needed was simply more assistance in the work of parenting. Mothers disappear and stretch themselves, because they don’t, in most cases, have any other option. A child has needs, and in this country at least, we have decided that those needs are best met by one woman, alone in an apartment, a hotel room, a hospital waiting room, you name it, desperately trying to bend herself to make it work.
Like the superb motherhood-on-trial film Anatomy of a Fall or the viral book Mom Rage, both now two years old, Legs may split the room between people who themselves feel seen by its main character and those who condemn her. As Linda herself wonders to her deeply unhelpful therapist, what is the difference between a “regular mom making a shitty choice” and a “straight-up shitty mom?”
Our obsession with what good mothering looks like often belies our inability to locate the problems of childhood anywhere outside of the mother-child dyad and may distract some viewers from getting the full experience of Legs. Not all parents will relate, as I did, to the claustrophobic terror of motherhood, portrayed here with much more rawness than in recent films like Nightbitch, which wink at the audience about a mother’s trials but ultimately insist she find fulfillment in them. Byrne’s performance as Linda is so relentlessly frenetic and immersing that I gave little thought to her child. This is a piece of art that, like Mom Rage, dares to illuminate a maternal experience independent of the experience of children — however uncomfortable that may be.
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The mothers whom this film will alienate or confuse, in my experience coaching parents for my day job, tend to have a combination of factors at their disposal: good self-regulation and mental health, supportive partnerships or a deep sense of purpose in solo parenting, nonaddictive personalities, kids with few challenges, nontraumatic births, and of course, money. Linda has none of these things. But instead of finding ways to offer these things up to the parents who need them, we see only the supposedly casual relationship between a mother’s distress and her child’s and judge them.
Bronstein forces us to confront that judgment by interspersing her film with references to the worst mothers possible: Linda watches clips of the interrogation of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in the bathtub, and catches the 1988 horror film Flesh Eating Mothers, about adulterous moms who literally eat their children, on the hotel TV. The director told me that these references felt important “especially in this climate that we’re in now, where people want us to have as many babies as possible but give us no support once we have those babies.” That, she believes, can lead to “some very dangerous situations.” Bronstein doesn’t think mothers like Yates, whose faith directed her to keep procreating despite the recommendation of medical professionals, are monsters. Instead, she asks herself, and her audience, “How do we understand them? How do we talk about them? And as mothers, how do we see ourselves in them?”
A few Halloweens ago, I dressed up as a Helicopter Mom — with a propeller hat and a shirt that said “I’d rather be writing my kid’s college essays.” This year, I plan to be a Refrigerator Mother, the mid-century monster blamed by psychologists for the rise of autism. What these two have in common is that they are red herrings for society’s ills — whether we are too involved or not involved enough, we are always condemned. In one of the many points of dark comedy in the film, a grocery-store sheet cake is decorated with the words “It’s Not Your Fault.” But when no one else is in the frame (Linda’s face is shot in a close-up for most of the film) — whose fault could it be?
Legs, like motherhood, cannot be contained by a single genre. It is the Enneagram Nine of movies — it sees all sides. I felt a radical power in its unique ability to hold empathy for women and children at the same time, something that can feel almost impossible in a patriarchal society where everyone but a select few are strapped for resources, where we rarely actually help mothers and can’t be bothered to help children much either, unless we have the chance to drag women in the process. (As Bronstein pointed out, we only know about women like Andrea Yates because a tragedy happened — and only, I would add, because a tragedy happened to their children.)
The day I watched Legs, I had been up half the night after a 4.6 magnitude earthquake hit a mile from my house. I woke up with my heart leaping out of my chest, sure that I was dying. My children woke up too, visibly frightened. As I ran downstairs to comfort them, I both relished the tenderness of the moment — as Linda is able to do at times despite the darkness, such as when she sings her daughter to sleep — and resented losing my sleep for the work of mothering. I knew after I got my kids down, it would take me another hour to calm myself. As Linda parrots back disingenuously to a condescending doctor insisting that she practice “self-care,” we’re supposed to put on our oxygen masks first, right? Like some mothers, I have become less stretchable as my children have gotten older, which in my case, though not everyone’s (see Linda’s daughter’s complex medical needs), also means easier. Most of the time, I can locate who I am. But all it takes is one sleepless night to get me back to the feeling I had while watching Legs, or Bronstein’s drunken motel bathroom, or my parked Subaru where I spent many 2020 afternoons crying and chewing on weed gummies. Now, I know I’m not a shitty mom. But back then, I sure could have used someone to help me, to make sure I didn’t become so stretchable that I snapped.
