Rose Byrne is doing everything right in a film that does not always deserve it. That is the short version of Tow. The long version requires a bit more patience, which, appropriately enough, is also what the film requires of you.
I watched this at home. No marketing, no buzz, no one talking about it anywhere. I genuinely do not know why because this film has things in it that are worth talking about.
Based on a true story, Tow follows Amanda Ogle, a homeless woman living in her ageing Toyota Camry on the streets of Seattle. When her car, her only home, her only lifeline, gets towed and she is handed a bill for $21,634, Amanda decides she is not going to just accept it. What follows is a year long legal battle against a tow company, a broken system, and a bureaucracy designed to wear people like her down until they give up. She does not give up.
Rose Byrne
Let us start where we should start. After her Oscar nomination for If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, Tow is another proof of just how good Rose Byrne is, and how underrated she has been for most of her career. Amanda is not an easy character. She is loud, erratic, prickly, sometimes self destructive, and not particularly interested in making herself easy to like. Byrne leans into all of that without flinching. She gives Amanda a specific voice, high and eager, skipping along the surface, that you slowly understand is a way of covering everything she cannot deal with. And when the film finally lets her drop that voice, in a scene where Amanda breaks down and admits what brought her to this point, it is quietly devastating.
She does not play Amanda as a hero. She plays her as a person. It is a performance that earns everything the film wants you to feel, even when the film itself has not quite earned it yet.
She does not play Amanda as a hero. She plays her as a person, someone who relapses, who pushes people away, who is estranged from her daughter and not entirely sure how to fix that. It is a performance that earns everything the film wants you to feel, even when the film itself has not quite earned it yet.
The supporting cast is good on paper and fine in practice. Dominic Sessa as the young lawyer Kevin is warm and believable. Elsie Fisher as Amanda's daughter Avery is the film's emotional backbone after Byrne herself. Demi Lovato and Ariana DeBose show up and do what they can with underwritten parts. I will be honest — I cannot stand DeBose. Something about her screen presence has never worked for me and this film did nothing to change that. Lovato fares better; she gets a small musical moment that is quietly effective and serves as a reminder that she is a more interesting screen presence than she is usually given credit for.
The Problem
The film is slow. Not slow in the way that patient, confident films are slow. Slow in the way that films are slow when they are not sure what to do between their best scenes. The legal battle, which is the spine of the story, repeats itself too many times. Amanda and Kevin try something, the tow company blocks it, they try something else, the company blocks that too. By the third or fourth cycle of this you can feel the film spinning its wheels. The pacing needed a harder edit.
There is also a tonal problem. The director Stephanie Laing comes from television and the film sometimes feels like television too. The villains are too cartoonish. The comedy sits uneasily next to the more serious moments about homelessness and addiction. Some of the dialogue states the film's themes so directly that it forgets to dramatise them.
The film wants to be Erin Brockovich. It has the ingredients. What it lacks is the confidence to let the difficult material breathe.
The Verdict
Tow is a film worth watching for Rose Byrne and not much else. The story is real and it matters. The performance at the centre of it is genuinely special, another reminder that she is one of the best actresses working right now, Oscar nomination or not.
But the film around her is too safe, too slow, and too afraid of its own darkness to fully deliver what it promises. And somehow, with a cast like this and a story this good, nobody is talking about it. That might be the saddest thing about Tow. You will leave thinking about Byrne. You will not think much about the film.