- Content: “Adrift, Troubled, Overwhelmed, and on the Edge”
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What You Need To Know:
As the distraught mother, Rose Byrne delivers a complex, first-rate performance in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU. Despite its humor, the movie’s rather depressing until the end. That’s when the mother, husband and daughter each do things that begin to help the mother heal. So, IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU has a light moral, pro-family worldview. However, it’s marred by feminist elements, excessive foul language, and some self-medication involving alcohol and marijuana.
Content:
Light moral, pro-family worldview about an overwhelmed and troubled mother where she, her husband and her ill child eventually do things that help the mother begin to heal, but the movie has some humanist, feminist elements where God plays no role and where the mother gets almost no help from any of the men near her;
About 63 obscenities (including about 37 “f” words), two strong profanities using the name of Jesus Christ, 12 light profanities, and one obscene gesture;
Water leak from an apartment above weakens a ceiling and part of the ceiling suddenly crashes down, man falls through hole in ceiling and breaks his leg, some news reports of bad mothers makes viewers wonder if the mother in the movie might do something bad to her daughter (this ominous possibility fades into the background, however), and a gross moment occurs when mother removes a long feeding tube from a hole in her daughter’s stomach (the hole immediately closes up and the daughter seems fine, no longer underweight and even happy);
No sex;
No nudity;
Mother medicates her anxieties and feelings of inadequacy with wine;
Brief tobacco smoking, and mother medicates her negative feelings by smoking marijuana a few times; and,
Mother leaves her daughter sleeping in their motel room three or so times, woman abandons injured man trying to help her, adult woman tries to get stubborn motel clerk to sell her some wine even though woman left ID in her hotel room.
More Detail:
Rose Byrne stars in the movie as Linda, a therapist. With her husband away on a luxury cruise as the ship’s captain, Linda is alone caring for their underweight daughter, who’s attached to a feeding tube because she refuses to eat much food. The daughter’s never shown so that viewers can focus on the mother.
One day they come home to find there’s a water leak from the apartment above. The leak is above the bedroom. While Linda looks at the crack in the bedroom ceiling, the ceiling collapses, creating a large hole. So, she and her daughter move into a motel.
No one seems concerned about Linda’s problems, not even her husband who calls her periodically. Linda shares a group of small therapy offices with another therapist-counselor, played by Conan O’Brien. Linda uses him as her own therapist, and even he seems overwhelmed by all her angst and problems. “I’m not sure I’m meant to be a mother,” she tells him.
Adding to Linda’s problems is that one of her own patients, a young mother, disappears while telling Linda she has to go to the bathroom. Linda must hand the woman’s baby over to the police, because the father is away at work. Instead of helping look for his wife, the husband calls up Linda to berate her about is missing wife.
Meanwhile, Linda self-medicates herself at night by going outside to drink wine and smoke marijuana. The booze and pot make her hallucinate lights in the sky and in the black hole in her apartment. A young black man named James tries to help Linda, but she’s afraid of him and cooly ignores him, despite his efforts.
As the distraught mother, Rose Byrne delivers a complex, first-rate performance in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU. Except for James, all the men in her life, including her husband and her therapist, don’t seem to help her much at all. Sadly, this sometimes gives the movie a humanist, feminist viewpoint that more’s oppressive than inspiring or enlightening. IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU also has lots of strong foul language. The movie’s rather depressing and hopeless until the very end, when the mother decides she’s had enough dealing with her daughter’s feeding tube, when the husband finally returns to take the burden of fixing the ceiling off his wife, and when the mother’s young daughter reaches out to her. The mother has become so overwhelmed by situations and circumstances that no simple solution can fix things. Instead, she, her husband, and her daughter all must become part of the solution. With her husband away and her child on a feeding tube, the family has become separated or alienated from one another. Thus, ending this separation and alienation becomes the first step on the road to recovery. Still, the ending in IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU would be more powerful if finding God were part of the solution.
