If you’ve seen Rose Byrne‘s star turn as the overwhelmed mom Linda in the why-is-it-considered-a-comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, you already know that therapy plays a multi-faceted role: she’s a therapist in therapy with a child who’s getting therapy.
Upon surviving this intensely stressful, emotionally unrelenting, and anxiety-inducing film (descriptors from critics’ reviews), your first question is…
What does that title mean?
Writer/director Mary Bronstein says it’s up to viewers to determine for themselves (ScreenRant).
Plot Summary of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Stephanie Zacharek, Time: Linda is “trying to hold everything together while her husband, a cruise-ship captain, is away at sea. Chiefly, she’s struggling to care for the couple’s young daughter, who’s being treated for a mysterious and stubborn illness: she refuses to eat, which means she gets her nourishment through a feeding tube…”
It’s been widely speculated that the diagnosis is ARFID (Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder).
What’s With All the Therapy?
Bronstein to Rebecca Martin, CinemaFemme, “Some people think the film is an indictment of therapy. It’s not. I believe in therapy. I go to therapy. I’ve been in therapy since I was 14…”
But sometimes, for a myriad of possible reasons, therapy doesn’t work. “That’s what I wanted to explore. Not the limitations of therapy, but the limitations of human beings. Linda hits her limit. Her therapist hits his. Her client hits hers. We all do. That’s the emotional core of it.”
The Trailer for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
Among the snippets of therapy in the teaser below are indications that Linda’s unnamed therapist (Conan O’Brien) can seem disconnected, curt, and perhaps overly weary of her neediness.
Therapy Scenes
Siddhant Adlakha, Mashable, points out that three of the first four scenes involve therapy.
- First, “an off-screen doctor (Bronstein herself) discusses Linda’s care options for her preschool-aged daughter (Delaney Quinn)…,” who has voiced some feedback about Mom that Mom doesn’t care to face.
- Next, Linda sees her Conan-therapist—“so buttoned-up, so repressed and so oppressed by his own patients” (David Crow, Den of Geek).
- Then, she walks down the hall to her own therapy office to see her own next client.
With client Caroline (Danielle Macdonald), Linda either lacks insight into how much they have in common regarding stressful parenting or just doesn’t show that she has this insight.
When Caroline flees one particular session, leaving her baby behind, Linda’s resultant freakout includes interrupting Conan-therapist’s session with another patient. Despite making it clear that this is unacceptable, he later relents and helps out a bit, moving Linda to emit an unheard “I love you.”
Earlier she’d described a dream to Conan-therapist in which he gets close to her physically. She has wanted to feel more special to him than just another patient.
In turn, it’s seen that Linda’s young client Stephen wants that too. Both Linda and Stephen are frustrated in this regard.
Conan-therapist, increasingly rigid, won’t even tell Linda if he has kids of his own. Bronstein has said she believes some therapists lack essential boundaries and some have “too many boundaries…perhaps an indictment of the Freudian School of the Blank Slate Therapist…” (Coleman Spilde, Salon).
Meanwhile, Linda’s been blowing off family therapy sessions (with Bronstein’s character), an essential part of her daughter’s treatment.
Ultimately, Linda commits another egregious offense when she attends that therapist’s parent support group and aggressively insists that what they keep hearing about their kids’ issues not being their fault is hogwash. She then flees.
The Ending
You’ve seen it, so you already know she’s failed her child, her husband, and herself—though maybe she plans to try to do better.
