Mother and Child: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

As the end credits rolled, a young woman down the row from me turned to her date and said: I thought this was a comedy. And so it is, but If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is a thoroughly walloping one of emotional intensity. It has laughs, but they’re of the choking, scoffing, incredulous kind as a woman in crisis sees life pile on yet more stress at every opportunity. It’s a harrowing picture about how sometimes it feels like life won’t stop kicking you while you’re down. So no one showing up for lightness will get that expectation satisfied. Writer-director Mary Bronstein crafts a movie with the bitter absurdities of struggle, and keeps a tight focus on her main character. Her every silent micro-expression practically shouts through widescreen closeups and framing with shallow focus that hold her captive for our attention, our empathy, and our scrutiny. She’s played by Rose Byrne in a performance of exhaustion and honesty that sometimes feels physically painful to watch. It’s that good. She’s playing a middle-aged mother in the worst week of her life so far. Her husband (Christian Slater) is away for work for the next two months. Their young daughter has a feeding tube for a mysterious illness, and as such is in and out of a treatment center every day. And then the ceiling of their apartment caves in, leaving an eerie, cavernous hole over her bed. Mother and child are forced to live at a seedy motel down the street. And she still has to manage treatments, get to work, get to therapy sessions, contact contractors, and juggle her growing alcoholism with the role of caretaker. It’s a rolling snowball of one thing after another, each mistake feeding the next until she’s drowning in anxiety, depression, and despair. 

The movie has such literally sensational commitment to its central focus on her mental state. It keeps the camera so close to her face that it often ignores other characters in the scene. Most evocatively, the daughter is a largely unseen voice, her presence just barely off screen. She’s a stress and a focus as looming danger or endangered figure. She’s omnipresent, dominating her mother’s worries while barely interrupting as a psychic presence the woman’s downward, inward spiral. Same, the husband, who is a voice over the phone. A patiently exasperated therapist (Conan O’Brien in an impressive dramatic turn) and a doctor (Bronstein herself) get some screen time, as do various irritating or menacing figures who add to her stress. You get the sense that she might not always be seeing others clearly, and wonder if her perspective is starting to warp ours. Even provisionally nice characters, like A$AP Rocky as a low-key charming neighbor at the hotel, are clearly only glimpsed through interactions with her. And then we keep returning to moody flashbacks half-seen with muffled sound, and ominous shots of machines pumping intravenous nutrition or gaping black holes on ceilings. It’s an obvious symbol of the darkness opening up inside this poor woman, whose near constant heightened state takes responses to every inconvenience, every impoliteness, every criticism straight out of control. Even the emergencies only tighten and heighten her already vulnerable state. Because the movie is so tightly filmed and precisely performed, it has so many emotional peaks and valleys while crescendoing to electric exhaustion. It never becomes a mere wallow in misery. It’s a movie that’s profoundly human, and humanely sensitive. 

Bronstein got her start in film associated with the so-called mumblecore filmmakers. Interesting to note that, twenty years on, the most prominent currently working veterans of that indie movement turned out to be formalists. Their cheap early efforts were often recognizable by their ugly consumer-grade digital aesthetic, slapdash blocking, and, yes, mumbled improvisation passing for dialogue. But now see Greta Gerwig’s Little Women or Barbie or Josephine Decker’s Shirley or The Sky is Everywhere and you see great interest in form through beautifully constructed works with intentional choices of style and mood that are some of the glossiest and handsomest—and most literate!—studio works out there these days. Amy Taubin’s infamous (to me, anyway) 2007 Film Comment takedown of the mumblecore style said it “never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding.” Probably so. But thankfully the best talents incubated there have lasted to give us such memorable and vivid cinematic expression. With this new feature, Bronstein has made a movie so detailed in style and with deep feeling and specificity to match, that the power of the experience is impossible to ignore, or to forget. 

Hive Mind: BUGONIA

A continuing delight of contemporary cinema is the Emma Stone collaboration with art house auteur Yorgos Lanthimos. Who’d have thought that her blend of screwball feistiness and laconic confidence would fit so perfectly in his dark deadpan extremity. And such variety! There was the snappy, fish-eyed period piece The Favourite, the explicit warped feminist Frankenstein riff Poor Things, and the bleakly wacky triptych Kinds of Kindness. In each, she pushes and pulls her physicality and psychological acuity with an intoxicating freedom, loose-limbed fearlessness launching through scenes both clever and exposing. They’ve re-teamed for the fourth time with Bugonia, and it’s the least of these. It’s no less well-photographed, rigorously sound designed, or precisely calibrated with discomfiting interpersonal dynamics. But the plot’s contortions, inspired by the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet, feel strangely stale and like an unusually disappointing dead end despite a live-wire contemporaneous flavor. Stone plays a calculated pharmaceutical CEO who is kidnapped by a desperately conspiratorial beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) convinced that she’s an alien in disguise. The bulk of the film concerns their mind games. He’s trying to get her to record a message for her mothership, demanding to be taken to her leader. He knows he's right because he's "done his own research." She’s trying to get in his head and talk him into letting her go. She never loses her sense of high status, even when her hair is shaved and she's shackled in a basement. It’s a tense standoff going nowhere fast. Screenwriter Will Tracy, of the similarly hollow The Menu, gets little deeper than the surface of the concept working despite all the right elements for something better buzzing around. 

It makes for a movie that’s largely a tense back and forth that’s also surprisingly static, going over the same points at progressively louder volumes. She’s so cruel and cutting, even in early scenes in which she’s a transparent, sanctimonious manipulator of a boss, and he’s so distressingly unhinged that we don’t get a good sense of where we stand. The movie is deliberately keeping us off balance, but it plays off our uncertainties with only easy points. We don’t much like the wealthy’s disregard for the common folk, but we also don’t want to see an innocent woman brutalized. We don’t much want a delusional man’s crackpot theories to be proven correct, but we also don’t want to see a grieving, mentally ill man taken advantage of, especially since he’s gotten his cousin (Aidan Delbis) wrapped up in this predicament, too. It’s a seemly intractable bit of unpleasantness surrounded by further characters who are either intensely vulnerable, like a comatose mother (Alicia Silverstone), or deeply disturbing, like a molester who’s now the town cop (Stavros Halkias). What could be bracingly misanthropic instead reads as empty provocation. It all adds up to a pretty grim straight line to a cosmic dark joke of a finale, and that’s hard to take. Where other Lanthimos movies are symphonies of bad feeling, this one’s pretty drearily one-note, despite his actors willing to go off on flights of fanatic nuance. He’s better than this. It takes a lot of talent to make a movie so well-made feel this much of a shrug in the end.