Myopic homelessness melodrama Tow impounds its principles
With little to say about the bureaucracy thrusting many onto the streets, the film gives into its sappiest impulses. At least there's Rose Byrne.
Photo: Roadside Attractions
At the peak of her rage Amanda (Rose Byrne), bikes headfirst into a chain-link fence. On the other side is her car, which has been her home for the last several months. The gate, like the petty bureaucracy of Tow, is composed of a series of interlocking, unrelenting parts. It’s the perfect narrative expression of Amanda’s predicament and that of so many Americans who face persistent barriers to basic human necessities. If only the rest of director Stephanie Laing’s film were as articulate in its images.
Tow is based on the true story of Amanda Ogle, a woman who challenged the drudging Seattle civic system to get the car she was living out of back after it was stolen and towed. Forced to either pay the fines or sleep on the street, Amanda—without transportation and struggling to keep a job—is thrust into tenuous social care networks. She survives on support from her new shelter friends (Octavia Spencer, Ariana DeBose, Demi Lovato) and the smarts of a well-intentioned lawyer (Dominic Sessa). Through her court trials and tribulations, Amanda not only tries to reclaim her car but also reclaim her sense of self, and repair her relationship with her daughter (Elsie Fisher), which has grown strained thanks to Amanda’s secret shame.
Tow observes Amanda’s routine, from finding 24-hour spaces to wash up and get something to eat, to the nightly wait in line at a shelter, to rigging her parked car for security when she’s turned away from a bed. Initially, there’s a sense of ubiquity, of watching what so many people have to do every day in America. Amanda feels like one of many. But as soon as the plot begins, Jonathan Keasey and Brant Boivin’s script loses sight of the overarching structural inequities and gets towed away by the melodrama.
Laing sets our expectations for this shallow perspective when the film opens with infotext about the millions of people who live out of their cars in the United States every night, quickly appending that this is one woman’s story. But Tow is not a social-realist movie. It is not a social-justice movie. It’s not even a fight-the-system drama. It’s a use-the-system dramedy about one woman, to the detriment of the other characters, the audience, and the film’s relevance. Her network of friends is a chain of tissue-paper dolls. Spencer is only around when Amanda needs a dose of “common sense,” while DeBose and Lovato are on screen just long enough to drop tragic character details about drug addiction and heartache; because we barely know these people, it all comes out as unearned, theater-kid hot air.
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