Mary Bronstein Made a Film About Motherhood. It Starkly Opposes Her Husband's Film About Becoming a Dad
Both Marty Supreme and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feature scenes in which ceilings cave in. In Marty Supreme, it’s one of many hurdles in Marty Mauser’s insatiable quest for success. He lands on a man and his dog who are staying on the floor below him in a cheap motel, and comes out relatively unscathed—literally and figuratively on top. In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Linda’s ceiling damage and the flood it brings to her apartment uproot everything.
The two films, though alike in their frenetic style, are dramatically different in subject matter. Marty, led by Oscar frontrunner Timothée Chalamet, sees an audacious ping-pong player stop at nothing to become a world champion. Rose Byrne leads If I Had Legs in the role of a woman spiraling out of control when she’s left to care for her daughter with a feeding disorder without any support. It has been widely praised for its unflinching portrayal of a mother in crisis.
Both films are headed to the Oscars (Chalamet and Byrne are among the frontrunners for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively). Therefore, so are Mary and Ronald Bronstein. Mary is the bold writer and director behind If I Had Legs, while her husband, Ronald, produced and co-wrote Marty alongside frequent collaborator Josh Safdie, who directed the film.
The Bronsteins are aware of the contrasts between their films. “Insofar as my movie is unabashedly female and about a very particular female type of struggle, that movie is about a very particular type of masculinity,” Mary told SheKnows when we spoke earlier this year. “It’s on purpose, and we have discussed it.”
“They’re sort of reverse images of each other in that way. If you think of all the things in my movie that Linda is being prevented from doing or how stifled and trapped she’s feeling, in Marty, he’s doing the complete opposite,” Mary says. “They’re both running, but she’s running away from something, and he’s running towards something.”
The couple, who have been married for two decades after meeting on the set of Ronald’s only directorial project, Frownland, share a daughter whose childhood illness inspired If I Had Legs. Forced to live out of a hotel near a treatment facility, while Ronald worked across the country, Mary wrote the film, which packs in questions about how identity and motherhood intersect—or, rather, how we force them to intersect even when they deserve to diverge. With its claustrophobic camera work and darkly funny script, it aggressively confronts the judgment passed on mothers in distress.
Marty is not obviously about fatherhood. However, while its protagonist is scheming his way to international table tennis success, a woman he’s neglecting is pregnant with his child. Ultimately, he fails to achieve his goal after he’s banned from the official world championship. He settles for a win against his greatest rival in an exhibition match that no one will remember. When he returns home, he barges into a New York hospital and asserts himself as the father of the baby he’s been denying until now.
Marty sees his newborn son and is immediately awash with emotion, sobbing helplessly. Whether he’s overcome with love for his child or dreading the reality he’s now face-to-face with after his dreams collapsed around him is up to the viewer. But the moment is, as Mary puts it, a uniquely male dilemma and not one afforded to his child’s mother, Rachel (Odessa A’zion), who doesn’t have the same opportunity to run from the responsibility of motherhood. Nor does Linda in If I Had Legs, who—despite her desire to run away—must change feeding tubes, drive to doctor’s appointments, and hold it all together while her husband is away for work.
“There’s a line in Marty that is maybe one of my favourite lines where Gwyneth Paltrow says, like, ‘What happens if this dream of yours doesn’t work out?’ And he says, ‘That doesn’t enter my consciousness.’ Now, that is a very male-entitled way to look at the world,” Mary reflects. “In my movie, the question would be, ‘Well, what if these things did actually get better?’ And she would say, ‘That doesn’t ever enter my consciousness.’ Because she’s so stuck.”