The New Yorker:

Between her new film, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” and her Apple TV+ series “Platonic,” the actress has created a diptych of stressed-out moms.

By Michael Schulman

Years ago, the filmmaker Mary Bronstein’s daughter, who was seven at the time, became extremely ill. Bronstein brought her to San Diego for treatment, leaving her husband home in New York. “We had to live as roommates in this really shitty hotel,” Bronstein recalled. “There was nowhere to go. I felt very trapped.” Every night, after her daughter went to sleep at eight o’clock, Bronstein would hole up in the bathroom with food and a cheap bottle of wine, working through what she now calls an existential crisis. It wasn’t just the stress and the isolation—she also dreaded what awaited her on the other side, once her daughter got better and Bronstein returned to her previously scheduled life. “What am I? Who am I? What am I doing?” she would ask herself. She was there for eight months.

Eventually, her daughter did get better, and Bronstein channelled the experience into a screenplay with the archly despondent title “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” Her first feature, the mumblecore comedy “Yeast” (2008), starred Bronstein and Greta Gerwig as twentysomething friends who go on a camping trip and meet a pair of guys played by Josh and Benny Safdie. “If I Had Legs” is about a very different stage of life. The main character, Linda, is a therapist on Long Island fighting through a Job-like litany of misfortunes. Her daughter is underweight and on a feeding tube. Her husband is off captaining a ship. Water bursts through her ceiling and floods her apartment, so she and the child move into a dingy motel. She keeps getting berated by a parking attendant at her daughter’s recovery center; one of her patients disappears during a therapy session and leaves Linda with a crying baby. “Time is a series of things to get through,” Linda laments. “Each goal is a cliff. There’s nothing at the end of it, but then it comes and there’s just another cliff.”

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