Rose Byrne Grounds Empathetic Portrait of Homelessness

A phrase that Amanda Ogle, the no-nonsense protagonist played by Rose Byrne in Stephanie Laing’s touching film Tow, hears a lot is “people like you.” Strangers reach for it when referring to her situation as an unhoused woman in Seattle, Washington, living in her car. Social services workers — or anyone tasked with helping her — use it to preface their shock at her determination. Passers-by, assuming she is down on her luck, deploy it like a compliment, as if Amanda’s intrepidness in the face of bureaucratic systems and run-of-the-mill social indifference is a testament to her personality rather than a necessary response to state failure. 

Amanda has a particularly hard time stomaching this phrase when her car — a 1991 Blue Toyota Camry — gets towed. Employees of this large auto company hauled her car, which was stolen while she was interviewing for a job at a high-end pet salon, without a second thought about its value. In addition to living in the vehicle, Amanda needs the car to get the gig. When asked if she could pick up clients’ dogs, she, eager to get back on her feet and put her veterinary tech license to use, said yes. So it’s more than an inconvenience when Amanda walks out of the salon to find her car missing. 

Premiering at Tribeca, Tow follows Amanda as she spends more than a year trying to get her car back from a tow yard. The film is inspired by the real story of an unhoused Seattle woman who fought an impressive legal battle against a tow company in order to get her vehicle back and clear an outrageous bill. Laing’s compassionate adaptation of the story details Amanda’s life before the tow-company nightmare and chronicles how the Seattle resident survives the city while navigating this taxing clash. Similar to Harris Dickinson’s stirring Cannes debut Urchin, Tow spotlights issues around homelessness and addiction with empathy, a grounded realism and a touch of humor. 

Working from a screenplay by Jonathan Keasey, Brant Boivin and Annie Weisman, Laing (Family Squares, Irreplaceable You) opens Tow with a statistic about vehicular residents across the country: The number of people who live in their cars falls somewhere between 1 and 3 million people. When we meet Amanda, she’s floundering in an already bad job interview. When the employer asks why Amanda has a vet tech license but no college degree, she becomes deflated. The interview ends with no job.

Laing steadily shepherds viewers through glimpses of Amanda’s life: We see her charging her phone in various establishments, texting her teenage daughter Avery (Elsie Fisher) and figuring out where she can park her car and get a good night’s rest. That last task proves to be the most challenging, and the scene of Amanda being harassed by neighborhood patrol reminded me of moments in Patrick Fealey’s harrowing account of being unhoused in America, which the writer published last year in Esquire magazine. His and Amanda’s experiences underscore how expensive it is to be poor in the U.S.

After reporting her missing vehicle to the unhelpful officers at the local precinct, Amanda finally locates her Camry in a tow yard. She begs the attendant (Simon Rex) to release the vehicle, but he, with a touch of shame, admits he doesn’t have the authority to do so. So Amanda, whom Byrne plays with a spunky persistence (think Frances McDormand in Nomadland with more perk), decides to go after the corporation that owns the tow yard.

Her story adopts the contours, and possesses the easy-to-root for energy, of all David vs. Goliath stories. In a small claims court, Amanda decides to represent herself, and her stirring testimony — plus the failure of the tow company’s legal counsel to show up — persuades the presiding judge to grant her a court order to retrieve the vehicle. The only problem is that her car is no longer in the yard; having been moved through the system, it is on its way to an auction and then likely a junkyard. 

Amanda doesn’t give up, though. She finds a church shelter run by a steely woman named Barb (Octavia Spencer) and enlists the help of Kevin (The Holdovers‘ Dominic Sessa), a rookie lawyer propelled by an endearing if clumsy idealism. He takes over her case by helping her file claims with the superior courts. At the shelter, Amanda forms genuine friendships with other unhoused people like Nova (Demi Lovato), a pregnant mother, and Denise (Ariana DeBose), a recovering addict whose cutting remarks and humor mask the pain of losing custody of her children. They help Amanda navigate her own alcohol dependency as well as the challenges in her relationship with her daughter.

Laing doesn’t opt exclusively for documentary-style realism like Dickinson does in Urchin. Tow leans into the natural comedy that arises from elements of Amanda’s situation without glamorizing the plight of the downtrodden. The score, composed by Este Haim (one third of the band Haim) and Nathan Barr (Salem’s Lot, The Diplomat), highlights the more whimsical moments in Amanda’s life, from coaxing the employees of the luxury grooming salon to give her a job to lightly mocking Kevin for all the ways he thinks he understands her. Vanja Cernjul’s unfussy cinematography relies on tight shots to lend the film intimacy, though one is left yearning for more sweeping views of Seattle. That wider perspective could have underscored the stark differences between the wealthy tech entrepreneurs Amanda references at one point and everyone else just scraping by.

Still, in its modest way, Tow sends a powerful message about how many of us have more in common with a person sleeping in a car than we do the billionaires we’ve been conditioned to admire.