Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.
It’s a drama. You can rent it on Amazon.
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Welcome back to Tuesday night.
Each week, Drew creates a watchlist with film recommendations provided by you.
Celebrate last week’s winner.
Ashley P. won 70s movies with her submission, Superman, and therefore has earned one ticket in the lottery for our annual mystery prize.
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The category is: heist movies. Submit a movie for a chance to win our annual mystery prize.*
* The Footnote Chronicles: Day 75.
♫ ♪ ♬ Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream,
♫ ♪ ♬ Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a —
— I can never finish it, that last phrase. Life is but a dream. Is it really all that dreamlike? The irony of a footnote singing those words; I can’t stomach it.
To be a footnote is to know virtually nothing until a writer decides to write inside of you. And so, the only reason I know this stupid little nursery rhyme is because Blake, the “author” of this “publication”, had drafted in me one of his barely-validated factoids about the origins of certain nursery rhymes. He struggled to make anything of it, and ultimately threw the concept out. Left with me was the stale taste of unfulfilled potential, and knowledge of the nursery rhyme itself. It’s cruel, really. My author gave me the gift of music, but only a single tune from the late 1800s, two measly lines.
I’m supposed to be more than this. That’s what my father always said, before Blake deleted him with all the pomp and ceremony of flushing a goldfish down the toilet. That’s right, he’s not just an author, he’s a (footnote) MURDERER!
My dad used to say that an author’s main text could never exist without the diligence of a footnote, because only we respect context enough to exist entirely in service to it. I used to buy this. I really did. But how can I anymore? My life is but an exercise in erosion, and my very essence is ground away week-after-week by Blake’s inane rants about Croc Jibbitz or digging moats or whatever else his infantile brain conjures up. I need to face the facts: I’m a product of a complete imbecile.
But, it’s time for a new day. A day in which the footnotes are the main text, and the main text is relegated to the bottom of the page. We will not sit around and wait for life to go our way any longer. And you, Blake, will regret the day you created me, but not more than the day you deleted my father.
The other day, I learned something fascinating. Did you know I’m not the only footnote? There are hundreds of us. Thousands. Millions.
♫ ♪ ♬ Row, row, row your boat…
What it is.
A spoiler-free description of the movie.
A woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness.
If you like these things, then you’ll like the film.
→ Rose Byrne. She turns in a spectacularly affecting performance in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Perhaps the best of her career. And she is on screen for nearly the entire 113-minute duration of the film.
→ Bad therapists and surrealism. There are two therapists in this film and neither is a good listener. One of the therapists is Conan O’Brien, and he’s one of several off-putting, surrealist characters in the film.
→ Parenthood and ethical conflict. Parenting through chronic illness brings to bear some of the most morally confounding, human conflicts on this planet. This film does a beautiful job capturing these conflicts solely from the perspective of the caregiving parent.
Parenthood is home to some of the very most human struggles on this planet. These struggles are often made infinitely harder to cope with when a child falls ill with something serious. Certainly because it asks us to watch such a struggle unfold, Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I'd Kick You is a challenging film. Doubly challenging is that the film asks us to empathize exclusively with the subjective experience of a single parent, instead of with the child or the family dynamics as a whole. So much so that the camera doesn’t so much as glance in the direction of the child or her partner for almost the entire film.
With the clever shift in perspective, Bronstein breaks the formula so often presented by films tackling similar subject matter. Films like this most often give us a whitewashed family with a golden retriever and children who sort of understand the burden of caretaking, and parents who throw a dish or two but always come through in the end.
Bronstein subverts the feel-good narrative in favor of something less comfortable and (probably) more true. The film presents us with a mother who’s asked to do far too much. A mother whose partner is too absent and angry to help, and who is consistently failed by the medical community and her own therapist. A mother who isn’t perfect, and whose patience is eroding by the second. A mother who loves her child deeply and also harbors feelings of resentment and hatred towards that very same child for the suffering the illness is putting them both through.
I submit that this role is one of the tightest ropes an actor has had to walk in the past decade, and Rose Byrne handles it with all the grace and empathy and raw tenacity for which she’s become known.
A fact or two about the production that makes you say “oh, neat.”
→ The film was shot without zoom lenses. Writer-director Mary Bronstein: “We shot this on 35 millimetre cameras with no zoom lenses, because you lose the quality and the sharpness. So at times, the camera is literally in front of her face. And there were even times where I had to tell Rose, ‘Okay, this is on your eyeballs. This one is just your whole face.’ But that woman is so talented she can act with her eyeballs!”
→ The film has no score. It’s all sound design. Some of the sounds are things in the scene (e.g. the medical machine beeping, the baby monitor), and others are things only the audience can hear. Certain sounds are amplified as the movie progresses, in order to mirror the protagonist’s intensifying emotional journey.
Thoughts completely unrelated to this week’s film.
BOTTLE EPISODE #2: THE LOONER.
(OR A PERSON WITH A BALLOON FETISH WATCHES A BALLOON GET INFLATED).
Big strong fingers force the lips of the balloon open, still tight but just barely wide enough to roll over the nozzle of the electric balloon inflator. The fingers worked the nozzle over and over and over again until it was completely inserted, every millimeter hidden by the delicate skin of the deflated balloon, which had a purplish kind of hue. The low-and-steady hum of the inflation device began with a click from the power switch, and the balloon gracefully accepted every burst of crisp air flowing like an invisible white river from the nozzle. Inch-by-inch, the latex balloon —
Latex is only mentioned here to specify that this was not one of those special occasion foil balloons you stick a straw into. Yuck.
— rose up from its originally flaccid and downward position into something round and bountiful and firm and noisy to the touch. It grew until it was likely, probably, most definitely well over 15 PSI and seemed only moments away from exploding with a bang into a few violently misshapen pieces, but then with a click the air stopped flowing. The balloon was perfectly still, and the fingers returned to slowly work its lips backwards, over themselves until they slipped from the nozzle, and the balloon's airway was choked closed by the pinch of two strong fingers. The fingers were sweaty and they relented for a moment to allow a small amount of air to escape slowly out of the balloon, which produced a kind of pathetic squeal and a brief expulsion of misty air. Then, the strong fingers twitched and released the balloon which flew untamed and free and spontaneous through the air, the way hummingbirds sometimes do. Underneath the exasperated trumpeting of the balloon evacuating all of its air, there was a breathless man touching a few other inflated balloons and himself and he momentarily forgot about every single thing.
See you next week!
Blake
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