No wonder Rose Byrne’s been nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as a beleaguered mother in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. It’s less performance, more self-administered open heart surgery. Come on, take a look inside – there’s no poeticism and no beautiful agonies, only piles and piles of viscera. Her eyelids look so heavy you can’t tell if she’s about to fall asleep, or traverse the astral plane, or if she’s just consumed enough analgesics to mellow out a racehorse. And her mouth is downturned at such a severe angle it feels dangerous to be in her sightline, in case she either a) vomits, b) starts screaming, or c) does both at the same time.
Some of the best portraits of conflicted mothers, such as Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love or Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, extend beyond descriptors like “messy” and “complex”. Instead, they start to scratch at the intolerable contradiction of the mother: sanctified, even by the atheists, yet left socially adrift, without the community and the support such an elevated role would surely require. It means there’s no margin for error. Heavy is the crown, but no one even told the mother how to put it on her head in the first place.
