"(Courtesy of A24) "Mommy is stretchable," says the lilting voice of a child from offscreen. Daddy is "hard," she tells an unseen counselor. But when mommy gets mad, she's more "like putty." Elastic. Malleable. Sculpted by the wills of others. As the child shares her crude impressions of her parents in the opening scene of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, the camera stays fixed on mom, Linda (Rose Byrne), whose marrow-deep exhaustion is laid bare in close-up."
"Her eyes water and wobble as she pulls her face into an awkward rictus. She's not sad, she claims-but why shouldn't she be? Mothering is hard, often alienating (from yourself, from others). But if the fantasy of the perfect mother, cheerfully tending to her flock, doesn't hold sway over families the way it used to, an outline of those expectations, as Bronstein's film makes clear, remains pressed into women's subconscious: Why does caring for something I love make me so unhappy?"
"One practical answer is that Linda is stretched thin. Her husband (Christian Slater), a cruise-ship captain, is at sea, yet again, leaving her to shoulder the work of parenting while juggling her day job as a therapist. The child-who remains nameless and offscreen, or visually obscured, for most of the film-also suffers from a mysterious illness that has left her, we learn, underweight."
Linda, a stretched-thin mother and therapist, endures marrow-deep exhaustion while balancing a demanding job and solo parenting with an often-absent husband. Her child remains mostly offscreen and suffers a mysterious illness that leaves her underweight, forcing Linda to manage weight-gain benchmarks and medical scrutiny. A household leak displaces them to a motel, compounding stress and logistical chaos. The child’s blunt descriptions of her parents—mom as malleable, dad as hard—underscore internalized expectations about motherhood and the gulf between loving care and the unhappiness that sustained caregiving can produce.
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