Smart timing, Vertical/Roadside Attractions. The studio piggy backed off of Rose Byrne’s well deserved Oscar nomination and released Tow the week after. This is as good a chance as this little film will get. It’s not the Oscar bait If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You was, and it’s not a summer blockbuster. Tow is a coattail rider, and with that at least you get a little bit of a lovely message along the way.
Who doesn’t love a Toyota Camry? Well, most people don’t particularly want a 1991 Toyota Camry in 2025…unless you’re Amanda Ogle (Rose Byrne) in Seattle, alone, and unable to afford rent for an apartment. She lives decently enough out of that car, making it work best she can to try to be a veterinarian, stay sober, and eventually take care of her teenage daughter Avery (Elsie Fisher) again. After an interview, terrible luck has someone steal Amanda’s car/home for a joyride. The car gets towed, where Amanda cannot pay Cliff (Simon Rex) the tow truck employee the daily storage fee to get her car back. With nowhere else to turn, a little light comes through via a temporary stay at a female homeless shelter run by Barb (Octavia Spencer), and Kevin (Dominic Sessa) a just out of school lawyer who hears poor Amanda and wants to help her as best he can defeat Martin La Rosa (Corbin Bernsen) and his predatory towing practices.
The key point Tow makes is that to fix homelessness you have to fix the human first. Like If I Had Legs, this is another showcase of what Rose Byrne brings to the table as an actress. She’s great outwardly projecting perky bubbly, but as people get through her layers, they find a sad, broken person underneath it, too scared to confront her real demons. The best parts of the movie are focused on Amanda’s journey back from personal oblivion and loserdom. She never accepted those parts of herself, so Byrne plays Amanda in arrested development and denial, too good for the help people throw her way at times. As invested as she is in getting her Camry back, as the movie goes on, the Camry is a false promise step back to success for Amanda. Instead, she learns she has to really understand herself better and fix Amanda; the car will come next. Byrne plays the rocky road Amanda navigates with grace and restraint, dialing up in bursts but then back to the inner battle Amanda wages daily with herself.
There’s a great Oscar winning drama surrounding Byrne’s performance somewhere. As is, the movie never quite comes together the way the cast really wants it to. That’s because of the tug of war between Amanda’s character study and the plight of the poor and homeless pieces of the story a bit at war with each other. All the homeless details are admirable, as is the spotlight on predatory regressive “services” like tow companies and how it spirals any person with no money. But Tow tries to bring the whole system into its tale, with Dominic Sessa’s legal battle, Octavia Spencer and the homeless shelter life of broken women, and Simon Rex working at the tow company, among many other little side studies. This means a lot of poorly built subplots that don’t have time to breathe, and get quickly but forcibly resolved to end the story neatly; Ariana DeBose gets a character that should be like Brooks in Shawshank but is handled so poorly we forget that she’s an ACTUAL Oscar winner. I little tighter focus would have given Tow that Novemberish release it so desperately wants to be a part of during Award Season.
But alas it’s not to be. Hey, at least Amanda has her Camry back right? This is a real story y’all, and even though I thought Byrne was a little too weirdly made up, the little snippets I got of real Amanda made it clear why Byrne wanted to do the movie. Can we get this woman a fashion show please? Pet fashion show, then we could have a real life Cookie Fleck on our hands, y’all.