Reviews: IF I HAD LEGS, I'D KICK YOU and IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

 by Rob DiCristino

A pair of bangers to which attention must be paid.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You (Dir. Mary Bronstein)

Parenthood is an honor. A privilege. A gift. For those of us lucky enough to raise children, the awesome responsibility that comes with shaping another human life is matched only by the sheer tonnage of love and purpose that responsibility inspires. Parenthood requires humility and grace; it requires patience and empathy. In exchange, parenthood gives us the opportunity to interrogate our values and our vices, to direct our focus onto what truly matters and why. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m sure that being a parent has shaped me into a better human being than I ever thought possible. It’s also shaped me into a Jenga tower of anxieties, a jittery lightning rod of apprehension built in a rush by the lowest bidder. Being a parent has cost me roughly half a year of sleep and at least twenty percent of my total body mass. Do you know what I worry about now? Everything! I worry about every single goddamn motherfucking thing, and I’ll tell you, sometimes I feel so out of my depth that I can’t believe I was ever entrusted with any of it in the first place.

Which brings us to If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You, Mary Bronstein’s excruciating portrait of a mother permanently perched on the edge of a similar physiological implosion. Linda (an absolutely stellar Rose Byrne) is a therapist who spends every second not in session with patients — or venting about their bullshit to her own therapist (a dry and droll Conan O’Brien) — managing an undefined illness that has left her daughter (Delaney Quinn, whose reedy, needy voice will stick with you long after the film ends) bedridden and perpetually underweight. With this illness comes a rubber feeding tube and mandatory visits with Dr. Spring (Bronstein), who sees the girl’s worsening condition as irrefutable evidence of Linda’s incompetent parenting. Already living on a steady diet of Reese’s cups, red wine, and self-loathing, Linda spins closer to oblivion when a gaping hole opens up in her bedroom ceiling, forcing the family into a cheap motel run by James (a charming A$AP Rocky) until her husband (an unexpected Christian Slater) returns from a work trip.

Bronstein's marriage to Safdie brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein — and the fact that her film is lensed by Good Time DP Christopher Messina — makes it impossible not to think of If I Had Legs as “the Uncut Gems of Motherhood.” It surely is, and then some. But while the Safdies’ films grant us enough distance from their harrowed heroes to make our own judgments about their behavior, this one keeps us in almost permanent extreme close-up on Linda’s face, denying us that level of objectivity and perpetually trapping us in her deteriorating perspective. By the same token, keeping Linda’s daughter a faceless presence beyond the edge of the frame denies us the satisfaction of their connection; Yes, parenting is hard, but it all becomes worth it when we look into our children’s eyes. Instead, Bronstein — whose cameo as the fastidious doctor adds even more grist to the thematic mill — forces us to empathize with a hot mess of broken humanity whose ultimate reward for her unrelenting struggle feels as impossible to grasp as our own.

If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You is in U.S. theaters now.

It Was Just an Accident (dir. Jafar Panahi)

Iranian dissident Jafar Panahi — whose landmark This Is Not a Film had to be smuggled out of Iran for competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 — returns with another polemic against his country’s oppressive regime, this one a rich and textured morality play about an auto mechanic (Vahid Mobasseri as Vahid) who believes the mild-mannered family man who visits his shop one evening (Ebrahim Azizi) with his daughter and pregnant wife in tow is actually “Peg Leg” Eghbal, one of the many agents who tortured him during a prison term he served for speaking out against unfair labor practices. Still haunted by the sound of his tourmentor’s squeaky prosthetic leg, Vahid abducts “Eghbal” and prepares to bury him alive in the desert outside of Tehran. The desperate captive claims innocence — indeed, the scar on his leg is too fresh to be Eghbal’s — giving Vahid just enough doubt that he sets out to find Peg Leg’s other victims, at least one of whom he hopes will confirm the match and help execute the justice Eghbal’s escaped for so long.

Vahid's motley crew of righteous avengers includes wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari), her current clients (Hadis Pakbaten as Goli and Majid Panahi as Ali, pulled away from taking their wedding photos and dressed accordingly), and her blustering ex-boyfriend (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr as Hamid). Though Vahid knows none of them personally, each one has their own chilling memories of Eghbal, and the moral debates that ensue throughout It Was Just an Accident — including whether or not to help their captive’s wife deliver her baby — examine the vicious cycle that enslaves oppressors and oppressed, alike. If the man Vahid has packed into his work van’s utility box is actually Eghbal — which, to be clear, no one riding alongside him in said van seems entirely sure about — then what manner of revenge is most appropriate? Should they torture him as they’d been tortured? Give him a quick death via a shovel to the skull? Bury him alive in the desert, as Vahid intended? How does one man pay for so much accumulated misery?

Assembled in long, static takes and performed by an exceptional cast of mostly non-professional actors, It Was Just an Accident resists indulging its heroes’ thirst for blood, denying them the clarity of purpose that would make these decisions too simple for a filmmaker as nuanced and humanistic as Panahi. That these people suffered in the past is less important than the fact that they are still suffering, that they suffer through everyday lives in which they may encounter — and may even have to serve — the very people who caused their pain, people who have been granted amnesty and anonymity by a government that wants everyone to forgive and forget. Maybe Vahid can forgive, and maybe the best way to punish Eghbal isn’t to kill him, but to make him live with the truth of what he’s done. No act of revenge can return to our friends what was taken from them, after all, and as It Was Just an Accident’s eerie final moments remind us, the sound of Eghbal’s squeaking prosthetic leg will live on in their minds long after his body rots away.

It Was Just an Accident is in limited theatrical release now.