Foul language, drug and alcohol abuse, some body horror and a heart-wrenching discussion about abortion make If I Had Legs I’d Kick You unwatchable. Rose Byrne gives a great performance as an overwhelmed mother of a special-needs child. But that mother’s actions (and those of the people who fail to support her) induce anxiety and anger more than sympathy.
Routine can be a good thing. It gets us out the door on time in the morning and gets the kids to bed on time at night. But too much routine can also feel a little draining.
Linda’s life is nothing but routine: Wake up, drop daughter off, go to work, see patients, go to therapy, pick up daughter, go home, go to bed, wake up to feed daughter, go back to bed, wake up to feed daughter, go back to bed, wake up to feed daughter, go back to bed … wake up, wake up, wake up.
If you’re the parent of a newborn, that routine may sound sleepily familiar. But Linda isn’t the parent of a newborn. Her daughter is old enough to form full sentences and tell her mother that she doesn’t want to eat food because it’s slimy or squishy or sticky.
Linda’s daughter suffers from a medical condition that causes a mysterious aversion to food. And it’s not just being a picky eater: The child refuses to eat anything.
Doctors fitted the young girl with a gastrostomy tube. She was pulled from school to attend a special program designed to help kids like her learn how to eat. It’s Linda’s job to try to get her to eat food during the day—and to only use the feeding tube at night to make up for any missed calories.
The routine should be helping Linda and her daughter to stay on track. Only it isn’t. In fact, it might even be making things worse.
Her daughter likes the routine. She’s comfortable in it. But Linda, who works as a therapist, worries that her daughter is using the feeding tube as a crutch: Why eat food, which is “gross,” if she can get what she needs from the tube?
Linda hates the routine. It’s pushing her to her limits. And between doctors telling her she isn’t doing enough to help her daughter, patients of her own refusing to take her advice, her own therapist becoming increasingly exasperated by her, living out of a motel because her house flooded and her husband being out of town on a lengthy business trip, Linda’s just about ready to rip that feeding tube out.
[The following sections may contain spoilers.]
This film largely serves as a cautionary statement about mothers putting too much pressure on themselves to be “better.” It also seems to ask friends and families of overwhelmed mothers—particularly their husbands—to support them rather than criticize or offer unsolicited “advice.”
One person who does seem to see how hard things are for Linda is her daughter. The little girl isn’t old enough to recognize that many of her own behaviors contribute to her mother’s stress, but she tells a doctor that sometimes her mom gets sad. She even sympathy cries with her mom. Mother and daughter promise each other that they’ll both try to get better—to be better.
Linda shares office space with another therapist—her own, in fact. But despite having sessions daily, she never seems to take his advice. He knows this because he sees her in action, so he tends to get frustrated and dismissive of her. However, when one of Linda’s patients is in crisis, he helps Linda resolve the situation.
None.
Though she’s initially dismissive and rude toward him, Linda appears to be attracted to James, the superintendent of the motel she’s living at. James seemingly flirts with the married Linda, too. However, they never voice or act on these feelings.
Linda tells her therapist she dreamt that he was flirtatiously tickling her. One of Linda’s patients tells Linda that he had a dream she kissed him.
We see a woman wearing an open shirt over a bra.
Linda tells her therapist that she was pregnant once before her daughter was born. She had an abortion because she and her husband weren’t married yet. She goes on to describe the type of abortion she had, saying it was physically painful. She briefly and tearfully wonders if she perhaps should have aborted her other daughter, and that intrusive thought makes her question whether she’s just not cut out to be a mother.
Linda and her daughter come home one day to find the place flooded. As Linda searches for the source of the water, the ceiling in her bedroom collapses—the result of a busted pipe. Linda and her daughter are frightened but unharmed.
When Linda’s landlord fails to repair the ceiling in a reasonable time frame, James offers to take a look. As they’re inspecting it (from the room above), James falls through the hole, breaking his leg. (We see a bone sticking out.)
Flashbacks show us that Linda had to physically restrain her daughter as the girl kicked and screamed so that doctors could sedate her to perform the surgery to insert her feeding tube.
When Linda is pushed past her breaking point, she decides to remove her daughter’s feeding tube herself. The scene, which takes place as the child soundly sleeps, is drawn out with body horror. Linda pulls the tube … and pulls and pulls. She removes several feet of tubing from her daughter’s intestines (in reality, G-tubes are only a couple of inches long). The hole then gurgles and closes, just as a doctor said it would.
Later, we’re told that something was oozing from the tube site, but it didn’t harm the child. However, Linda’s husband is horrified when he learns what she’s done, both because his daughter is still not eating and it’ll require another surgery to insert the tube again.
Linda buys a hamster for her daughter, and as they take the new pet home, it tries to escape its cardboard box. We hear that it bites the girl. Linda pulls the box into the front seat and the creature bites her as well. Linda pulls over to deal with the hamster, and while she’s parked, someone rear ends her. Her daughter screams in fear, though she’s unharmed. When Linda gets out to inspect the damage, the hamster escapes the vehicle. It runs into traffic, where it’s promptly (and bloodily) run over, causing the little girl to screech even more.
Linda’s daughter talks about death a lot. When their house floods, she asks her mom repeatedly if they’re going to die. When the aforementioned car wreck occurs, she’s practically inconsolable, terrified they’ll be killed. (At one point, Linda sings a song about a dead whale to get her daughter to fall asleep.)
A patient of Linda’s expresses a fear of leaving her newborn son alone: She’s terrified that something bad will happen to him. She tells Linda a story she read about a babysitter who murdered the two children she was watching. Later, she sends the article to Linda.
One woman slaps another across the face. Someone accidentally burns herself while smoking a cigarette. Linda watches a movie depicting a mother eating her own child.
At the film’s end, Linda runs into the ocean, repeatedly getting knocked back by the large waves. It’s unclear if she’s trying to drown herself or just shock her system. In any case, she finally collapses on the beach.
There are more than 40 uses of the f-word and more than 30 of the s-word. We also hear uses of “a–,” “a–hole,” “d–k” and “h—.” God’s name is abused 16 times, and Jesus’ name is abused four times.
Someone uses a crude hand gesture.
Linda drinks and smokes copiously to deal with her stress. She also smokes marijuana.
James invites her to order drugs online. He purchases ecstasy; she purchases cocaine. We never see the pair actually use the drugs.
The people who see Linda on a regular basis—her husband, her therapist, her daughter’s doctor—fail to see her struggles or support her. Her husband is away on business for much of the film, calling Linda daily to criticize her and offer unsolicited advice. She tries to explain her stress, but he argues that his job is much worse than anything she’s experiencing, belittling her and demeaning the work she does as a therapist.
Linda’s therapist talks down to her because he’s tired of her not taking his advice. At one point Linda asks him, point blank, to tell her what she should do. He replies that she should get a solid night’s sleep, stop drinking and quit using drugs. She dismisses these suggestions.
The doctor treating Linda’s daughter tells Linda that she needs to take care of herself, which Linda takes as an insult. Her daughter describes her as “stretchable” during a family therapy session with the doctor. The girl explains that it’s easy to manipulate her mom into getting what she wants. (Which the doctor recognizes as part of the reason why the child isn’t getting better.) Linda is insulted by this, too, arguing with both her daughter and the doctor, because she feels like it’s a judgment of her parenting.
It should be noted that Linda frequently lies to her husband, her therapist and her daughter’s doctor, which doesn’t help matters.
As Linda’s stress and cumulative lack of sleep increases, she begins to hallucinate. These visions are presented in the film as almost psychedelic. Linda also begins to fall asleep in her (parked) car, as well as in sessions with patients. Like her own therapist, she becomes angry with patients who refuse to heed her advice, lashing out at them.
One of these patients is the mother of a newborn. Like Linda, she feels overwhelmed by the responsibility of parenthood, and she doesn’t have an emotionally supportive partner at home. So when Linda dozes off during a session and snaps at her, the woman excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Instead, we learn, she leaves the building entirely, abandoning her baby in Linda’s office.
Linda calls the woman’s husband, and he yells at Linda over the phone. He wasn’t aware his wife was seeing a therapist. He’s angry at his wife for leaving their son behind since it’s her “job” to take care of him. He refuses to leave work to pick up the infant, demanding that Linda care for the baby and meet him at his office after work is over. Linda warns him that, for personal and legal reasons, she cannot do that, and that she’ll be forced to call the police if he doesn’t come to get his son. He still refuses, and Linda indeed contacts the police. A few days later, the man calls her back: His wife is still missing, and he’s angry that Linda hasn’t called them to check up on them.
Linda frequently leaves her daughter alone in the motel room at night. This greatly upsets her husband, since he doesn’t think their daughter should be alone with her medical condition. And when the girl wakes up one night while her mom is gone, we learn that she panics. (James hears her from the next room and offers to sit with her until her mom returns.)
When Linda drops her daughter off at the clinic where the girl is being treated, she double parks. She does this repeatedly in spite of warnings from a parking attendant, and she’s very rude to him, hurling insults.
This is a pattern for Linda, who becomes increasingly rude to people throughout the film, unwilling to listen to anyone who isn’t telling her what she wants to hear. During a class for the parents of children with food aversion, Linda snaps at her daughter’s doctor and the other moms, blaming them (and herself) for having children with this condition.
Linda speaks in Spanish to her landlord, clearly making an assumption about his nationality, before he says he doesn’t know Spanish.
Someone steals wine from a motel fridge. After rear-ending Linda’s car, a man tries to get out of exchanging insurance info, since he doesn’t think the damage was that bad. Folks use the “dark web” to purchase illegal drugs.
Yet another Oscar-bait offering this season, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You seems to be sympathizing with mothers who simply aren’t offered the support they so desperately need. That’s certainly the case with Linda (and it appears to be the case with another young mother in the film).
However, the film also seems to say that some mothers shouldn’t be mothers. Linda wonders whether she should have ever become one. She feels trapped. She wants her daughter to get better. She herself wants to be better. But she doesn’t see any solution in sight. So she takes matters into her own hands. She can’t “fix” her daughter or abandon her, but she can get rid of her daughter’s feeding tube. She thinks this is the solution (or at least a solution). She thinks she and her daughter will both be better once it’s gone.
As someone with first-hand experience with feeding tubes, Linda’s decision to remove it infuriated me. And the body horror of the removal made me want to empty my stomach—not because it was particularly bloody (although it was pretty gross), but because her actions were so selfish and irresponsible.
That said, I also recognize it wasn’t entirely Linda’s fault. She was struggling, but nobody was helping her. She was asking for help—the very fact that she was in therapy proves that—but she wasn’t receiving it.
In fact, the only person who does see how hard things are on Linda is James, a practical stranger, who tries to help Linda the only way he knows how: offering drugs.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, as a whole, made me feel like I was having an anxiety attack. There are a lot of potential emotional triggers here. And besides the content concerns I’ve already listed, we see depictions of alcohol abuse, hear foul language and are party to a heart-wrenching discussion about abortion.
With so many moving factors, I’ll conclude with this: If you have legs, kick this film to the curb and watch something else. Also, hug a mom.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
