‘Tow’ review: Rose Byrne holds this based-on-real-life story together

Movie review

Based on a real-life Seattle story, “Tow” is the tale of one woman who, in her own words, “fell into bad luck and didn’t have a safety net” to catch her. Amanda Ogle (Rose Byrne) is homeless, though she doesn’t like to describe things that way; as the film begins, she’s living in her 1991 Toyota Camry, struggling to find a job and get her life together. One day, as she’s at a job interview, the car is stolen; it’s swiftly recovered by a towing company, which demands an exorbitant fee for returning it to her. Without money but with endless determination, Amanda set out to find justice and get her car back. It’s no spoiler to say simply that justice, or something resembling it, takes a very long time.

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Stephanie Laing’s film (shot almost entirely in New Jersey, with a few Seattle establishing shots) is interested in what justice looks like for someone like Amanda, and we follow her through every step of the journey: the weary bureaucrats who’ve heard it all; the rule-followers not interested in the human in front of them; the casual condescension toward “people like you”; the way the loss of a shabby sedan meant that the floor has dropped out from under Amanda, leaving her to navigate the world of shelters — and the reality that no car can mean no job. A young lawyer (Dominic Sessa, of “The Holdovers”) takes an interest in her case — “My car is older than you!” Amanda says with alarm — but he can’t work a miracle. The days tick by, shown to us on screen and getting well into triple digits.

“Tow” occasionally loses its way a bit; an opposing lawyer (Corbin Bernsen) is cartoonishly evil, and the movie at one point screeches awkwardly to a halt so that Demi Lovato, who plays a resident in the shelter in which Amanda lives, can sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” But Byrne, a recent Oscar nominee for “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” holds it together. Her Amanda is smart and funny (watch for a tiny, perfect moment when she says “Pardon me” to a desk) but also entirely unfiltered and a bit of a mess, and we don’t entirely know why until a long, beautifully delivered monologue late in the film. That decades-old car means much, much more to her than the small amount it’s worth; for Amanda, it was both shelter and symbol — something she could call her own, and worth fighting for.

‘Tow’ ★★★ (out of four)
With Rose Byrne, Dominic Sessa, Octavia Spencer, Demi Lovato, Ariana DeBose. Directed by Stephanie Laing, from a screenplay by Jonathan Keasey and Brant Boivin. 104 minutes. Rated R for language and some sexual references. Opens March 19 at multiple theaters. On March 20, producer Brent Stiefel, and real-life subjects Amanda and Avery Ogle, and lawyer Kevin Eggers will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A following the 7 p.m. screening at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

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