The “Marty Supreme” question that got old in about five minutes — was the title character likable enough? —shouldn’t even be allowed in the same room with Rose Byrne. From the annoyingly upscale “perfect” boss’s wife in “Bridesmaids” to the miserable mother who becomes cosmically unglued in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” she has made a career of playing characters who are haughty and testy, glamorously difficult and hard to cozy up to. But that’s part of her pizzazz as an actor. Who would want Rose Byrne to give you the warm fuzzies? (Though I’m betting that if you cast her in a Colleen Hoover soaper, she’d nail it.) “Tow” is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.
At first, we don’t like her at all. After a while, we still don’t (much), but we find ourselves connecting to something in her that transcends likability — her humanity. That’s acting alchemy.
“Tow” is an elongated anecdote based on a true story, but when you see the film you may think: Why couldn’t they have just made this up? Byrne plays Amanda Ogle (pronounced Oh-gle), who is living out of her car in Seattle. It’s a beat-up 1991 slate-blue Toyota Camry, but the vehicle isn’t just her home; it’s her only friend. She talks on the phone to her teenage daughter in Utah (played by Elsie Fisher, who was so terrific in “Eighth Grade”), but that’s her one connection, and it’s hanging by a thread. We never hear the full story of how she got to where she is.
But Amanda’s presence tells us all we need to know. The blonde hair with bangs, put up in a paisley pink kerchief with a plastic flower tucked in, the leather jacket and big dark-pink sunglasses, the snarling scowl of defiance that’s almost part of the look — it’s all a bit thrift-shop punk, and so is her attitude. (She has the aura of someone who was a punk and is still trying to figure out how to age into adulthood.) Amanda snaps at everyone, but Byrne has such a quick mind that we’re alive to her insults and doomsday quips. Her invective perks us right up.
The movie is this simple: Amanda’s car gets stolen, then recovered the next day, but it’s being kept at a commercial lot — Kaplan Towing — that’s charging her $273 before she can drive it away. To Amanda, that might as well be $273,000. She’s a vet tech who has finally landed employment at a veterinarian’s office, where she’s supposed to do pick-ups. But she can’t do the job without the car, and she can’t pick up the car without the job. The movie is about how she spends an entire year living as a homeless person trying to get her cruddy Toyota back.
She crashes at a church homeless shelter, with adjacent 12-step meetings, the whole place overseen by Barbara, played by Octavia Spencer with a pitch-perfect compassionate ruthlessness. Amanda then takes her case against Kaplan Towing to court, serving as her own lawyer, and she wins the case! — but when she arrives back at the lot in triumph, it’s only to find that they’ve already sold the car at auction. She meets a nonprofit lawyer, Kevin (Dominic Sessa), who’s a saintly geek, and they spend months working on the case. She gets roughed up by the homeless shelter’s resident sociopath (Lea Delaria, who is riveting) and meets comrades like the sweet Nova (Demi Lovato) and the combative Denise (Ariana DeBose), who’s as difficult as Amanda is.
We learn that Amanda is a recovering alcoholic (seven months sober) who had her first drink at 11 (in reaction, the film implies, to her being abused by her father when she was 10). But instead of filling in her slow slide into parking-lot vagrancy, what the film leaves unspoken is that whatever problems she had were pushed over the edge by an impossible economy — which combined, in some way, with her impossible personality. The (minor) strength of “Tow” is that it makes no apologies for Amanda, never pretending that she’s a functional person. Yet it shows us her flawed heart. If the film has a message, it’s that assholes who have lost everything are people too. Especially when they fight the system.
I just wish that the storyline built to something. I like anecdotal movies, but the fact that Amanda spends a year working to get her car back and, from what we can tell, doing little else starts to make this ragtag “Candide” of city bureaucracy feel like it’s running in place. Amanda’s car is more than her car; it’s her dignity. But the film never takes the leap into seeing that thinking that way might be part of the problem.
English (US) ·