Category: Rose Byrne

IF I HAD LEGS, I’D KICK YOU

By Marc S. Sanders

“Stretched too thin” is a phrase I’ve always equated to having too much on your plate.  (Sorry for using one cliche to explain another.) At the opening of Writer/Director Mary Bronstein’s film, If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, the voice of Linda’s young daughter describes mom as being stretchy when she is upset.  Bronstein’s lens is in close up of Rose Byrne’s weary complexion as she hardly convinces anyone that she is happy, while never getting upset.  Over the next two hours, viewers will know the truth and perhaps empathize or grow just as exhausted with Linda.

With her husband (the voice of Christian Slater) away on Navy leave, Linda is left to her own devices to care for her clingy daughter (Delaney Quinn) with a hyperactive personality and an ailment of being underweight for her age.  A feeding tube must remain inserted in the girl’s belly until she reaches at least a weight of over fifty pounds.  That requires Linda to take her daughter to a special facility for education and careful monitoring.  Joint sessions with a health care professional are also required, but Linda does not have enough hours in a day to attend. At night she has to fill the IV feeding bag periodically.  Because of her unfairly described “neglect” the girl will not be able attend the facility much longer while Linda balances her overindulgent career as mental health counselor.  

On top of all of this responsibility, a leak above her apartment has turned into a deluge and a gaping hole of mildew and mold is infesting their home.  Mom and daughter have no choice but to relocate to a crummy beach side motel.  It seems they’ll be staying there indefinitely as the repairs are not getting mended with any kind of urgency.

Linda has a troubled patient too; a new mom named Caroline (Danielle Macdonald) with a paranoia of what could happen to her infant child under any kind of circumstance.  How can Linda lend professional guidance if she’s losing control of her own well being?  

Linda’s only outlet is a psychologist that she leases an office from.  The most unexpected of all people plays this uncaring and uptight douchebag.  It’s Conan O’Brien and he is so far removed from his comedic and sophomoric personality that it took me a second to recognize him.  He’s not psychotic or sociopathic, but he is disturbing.  Yet this is the guy that poor Linda has to vent her frustrations towards.  

There’s also a parking attendant who’s a consistent, nonnegotiable dick.  

Linda just can’t get a break.  She has no support system.  She can’t find help anywhere and as the days pass so does her lack of emotion and care appear to amplify.  

It did not surprise me to learn that If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is produced by one of studio A24’s Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems, Marty Supreme).  What is it with these guys?  They love the stressful extremes that can uphold a motion picture.  The achievements found in Mary Bronstein’s film are well done in a unique way.  Nevertheless, this is no fun time at the movies.  

Bronstein’s strategy is to pound the unbearable weight of her entire script on Rose Byrne’s character.  Following a prologue, the music blares, and the title appears in giant red block letters on your screen. A few minutes later, in the dumpy hotel room, Linda has a B-horror movie on. Linda’s situation is so much worse than a horror movie.

You never see Christian Slater or Delaney Quinn on screen.  You hear Linda’s husband through her cell phone with his unfair treatment and responses to what she shares with him, and you only hear the whiney voice of a preteen’s exaggerated fears of food and brief separation from mom.  Everyone that inhabits the world of this film have their own respective aggravations, but it’s Linda’s that matters.  As additional triggers unfold, it is Linda we focus on as she drinks and gorges herself on junk food and appears more and more disheveled with her hair, clothes, complexion and body posture.

I’ll never be a mom, but I’ve been a parent for nearly two decades and I could recognize the warning signs that Linda is encountering.  Let’s talk about how hard it is to be a parent and a full time working one with a child that needs maintenance all twenty-four hours of a day.  Too often all forms of media present an idyllic way of family life, even in those heartbreaking dramas like Ordinary People or Kramer Vs Kramer.  Try doing it by yourself when no one is listening to you, while at the same time insisting you are doing it all wrong.

Once the film began, I suspected that we would not see Linda’s daughter or husband.  We’d only hear them.  Simply put, her family cannot see the agony that we see for poor Linda.  It reminded me of Charles Schultz’ Peanuts cartoons.  You’d hear the adults, like the teacher or mom and dad, in a drowned out and incomprehensible voice but you’d never see them or understand what they’re saying.  You only saw the children and what was regularly ailing them, like Lucy calling Charlie Brown a blockhead when he couldn’t kick the football, or Linus’ dependence on his security blanket.  Feels like the reverse happens in If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You.  If anyone in Linda’s current state could recognize what she’s enduring, then maybe they’d help.  At best there is only a drug user (A$AP Rocky) who offers to lend some kind of hand, but Linda recognizes a threat from his presence and only relies on him for the worst thing for her under these circumstances.

Even with Mary Bronstein’s choice to have Linda hallucinate into the depths of that giant hole in her apartment ceiling, her film is entirely relatable and absolutely unpleasant.  However, it is also fiction.  Because of that, I wish the script did not turn to the main character having the insatiable need to drink and do drugs.  I’m at a point where I ask if that is all there is for people under duress.  They can’t have gone far enough unless they’re alcoholic or addicts?  I’m not a drinker, but I’ve encountered terrible depths in my life. I insist as a dad, I experienced a kind of postpartum depression following the birth of my child. It was awful. Yet I did not turn towards alcohol and drugs. Junk food and temper tantrums are what weakened me. In movies, drugs and alcohol are too often the go to device for the poison of choice. Can’t we see something else for a change when our protagonists experience dire straits?

Before chemical substances are ever introduced in this film, I felt Linda’s aggravated plight and the weight on top of her.  Midway through, the trope of downing a bottle of cheap wine and going back for more crutches the film too often.  I’ve seen this kind of story enough already.  Not everyone who is suffering the challenges of life are chemically dependent.  If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You didn’t need to go here like every other movie in that crowded fraternity of drug use and alcoholism.  

A beyond stretched Rose Byrne with a strong promise of winning a much deserving Oscar is more than enough.

KNOWING (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Alex Proyas

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Rose Byrne, Ben Mendelsohn (plus an early sighting of a young Liam Hemsworth in his first movie role)
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 33%

PLOT: M.I.T. professor John Koestler links a mysterious list of numbers from a 50-year-old time capsule to past and future disasters and starts to wonder…what happens when the numbers run out?


[SPOILER ALERTS…not that anyone is going to rush out and stream this, but whatever, still … SPOILER ALERTS]

Knowing is a polarizing film from Alex Proyas, the visionary director of The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998).  It tells the story of an M.I.T. professor whose son is given an envelope that has been sealed inside a time capsule for 50 years.  Inside the envelope is a list of seemingly random numbers that appear to be meaningless, until he notices a pattern emerging.

I remember when this movie came out very well.  I was stoked to go see it because Alex Proyas is one of my favorite directors. But it got PANNED right out of the gate.  And most of the negativity stemmed from the movie’s ending, which turned off the vast majority of moviegoers who thought was the equivalent of someone saying, “It was all a dream!”

Knowing does NOT have one of your typical Shyamalan-esque endings.  The ending follows the strict logic of everything that has come before and arrives at an astonishing, awe-inspiring conclusion that left me gobsmacked.  But more on that later.

Let’s talk about how Knowing works.  First, everything about the movie sets us up for what appears to be a standard horror movie with Nicolas Cage’s son apparently in danger from mysterious pale figures in dark coats who show up at their house in the middle of the night and just stand there…watching the house.  Creepy.  At one point, one of them somehow gets INSIDE the house, a sequence that ends with the boy having a nightmarish vision of a raging forest fire.

These are, so far, basic horror tropes.  But director Proyas uses skillful styling and editing to create something that feels as creepy and suspenseful as any horror movie I’ve seen.  In fact, every time I watch Knowing, I find myself still on edge during certain scenes, particularly the ones involving the pale strangers.

Another feature of the movie that I feel elevates it is the visceral nature of the key scenes involving various accidents.  See, that 50-year-old list of numbers is actually a list of dates on which various catastrophes occurred over the last 50 years, along with the number of casualties…and Nicolas Cage’s character, John Koestler, can plainly see that three of them are coming up in the next few days.

So it’s a foregone conclusion that we, the audience, are going to see some sort of major accidents.  And, man…I have never seen, before or since, such astonishing, nerve-racking sequences of horrible accidents in films.  I don’t want to be a spoiler, but I CAN say that I guarantee this is one movie that will never be an option for in-flight movie channels on commercial airliners.  I mean…when it happens, it’s out of the blue, and it feels as real as these things can get with CGI.  It literally takes my breath away every time I watch, and I’ve seen it like ten times.  Easily.

So now that Koestler has proof the list is real, the question that keeps nagging at him is…what happens when the numbers run out?

And that’s where Knowing leapfrogs over other genre thrillers and actually becomes ABOUT something.  Before finding that fateful list, Koestler asks his students at M.I.T. to write a paper on determinism versus coincidence in the natural world.  That is, do you believe that everything up to this point has happened for a reason, or is literally everything we do completely random, with no purpose or design?  Koestler believes in the latter, even though he’s the son of a minister, a man with whom he’s had no contact for years.

Koestler has his reasons.  Years ago, his wife was killed in a hotel fire, an event which he perceives as a random accident.  But then he gets this list, and it seems as if someone has been able to accurately predict seemingly random events.  This list flies in the face of everything he’s believed for years.  If these accidents are predictable, is everything ELSE predictable?  Is there a REASON for the accidents?  Is life more than just the result of millions of years of evolution and genetic mutations?

Koestler cannot square this list with his personal beliefs, and it’s that conflict that’s at the heart of the movie.  Knowing forces its main character (and, by extension, the audience) to make a decision one way or the other.  Is there a plan for existence, or is it random?  How long can he ignore the evidence of his own eyes before he makes his choice?

And over all of that, there’s still the issue of the list running out of numbers.  What happens then?  The end of the world?  Is he destined to SAVE the world?  Or stand by helplessly as pre-determined events spin forward out of his control?

This is why the movie stands above other genre sci-fi thrillers.  It poses tough questions and forces us to confront our own beliefs.  And the movie does not take the easy way out by trying to have it both ways.  The finale of Knowing is as implacably logical as it is visually stunning.

Detractors of the movie decry this finale as a “deus ex machina” that cheapens everything that came before.  I even remember some mild laughter in the audience when I first saw it.  But seriously…given everything that happened before, what ELSE would have been a good ending?  Have Koestler wake up from a dream?  Have him discover that it was all really a government experiment?  A drug-fueled hallucination?

None of those would have worked NEARLY as good as the ending the movie DOES provide.  As I said before, it follows the logic of its own story to the bitter end, and gives us some spectacular visuals into the bargain.  It doesn’t cheat, it doesn’t pander or cop out.  We have gone from point A to point B, and the only way out is through point C.  When you think about it, isn’t that kind of audacious?  How many movies have had the nerve to follow the courage of its own convictions?  (I’m reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai with its own fatalistic finale, combining spectacular visuals with an ending that was not a “happy” one by any stretch of the imagination.)

I stand behind this movie as one of the great sci-fi mystery thrillers.  Love the ending or hate it…I challenge you to come up with an ending that would have been better than the one presented in the film.