If I Had Legs is a feel-bad movie that will plunge you into whatever depressive state that Rose Byrne portrays of the contemporary pressures of working professional moms. Add it to the likes of Tully (some of the earliest reviews for this site!), and the breakneck, unrelenting psychic assault of Joker or I Saw the TV Glow. It shares some obvious elements with Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson’s evanescent wide release of Die My Love in November.
If I Had Legs has some distinctive storytelling features: the camera hovers about a foot from Byrne’s face for the entirety of the movie and her child, who seems to be suffering from a long-term illness which may or may not be a disability or congenital, is never shown and never in pain, though the threat of her being hurt or worse seems to hang in the air as a cruel possibility throughout. Because of these choices, the film settles into a character study of an intelligent woman under enormous pressures, giving voice to the darkest thoughts that mothers have about their failures as parents: anxieties about the medical establishment, the absence of fathers, the alienation of friends (who, weirdly and unethically, are often the people who are in the position of antagonizing her parenting in the very hospital where her kid receives treatment), and alienation of space (in the form of a gaping hole in her ceiling).
Rose Byrne’s metaphorical torture at the hands of society over the course of the movie does not necessarily qualify as a plot per se, though there are scenes, especially the ones with Conan O’Brien cameoing as a psychiatrist which do some interesting things to cast Byrne as manipulative to break the monotony of her parental crucifixion.
There are moments where she seems to do some wish fulfillment of moms everywhere by walking out of range of her baby monitor, which is she constantly tethered to throughout the course of her day, for her not-baby-aged child, who is sometimes capable and sometimes incapable of caring for herself, depending on what the script requires. In those moments of recklessness and high fantasy, her self-destructive streak is at once innocent and unforgivable: she abandons her child to assess the damage to her house and smoke some weed, not get shit-faced at a club (although she does seem to get pretty drunk around and near her kid, enough so that her child is used to rebuffing her inebriated cuddles in her at-home hospital bed).
The movie takes some big swings at describing the vibes of stress-mothering but where it excels at atmospheric moodiness, it lacks in narrative structure or reliability as the movie toggles between magical realism, dreams, and reality.
