The โMarty Supremeโ question that got old in about five minutes โย was the title character likable enough? โshouldnโt even be allowed in the same room with Rose Byrne. From the annoyingly upscale โperfectโ bossโs wife in โBridesmaidsโ to the miserable mother who becomes cosmically unglued in โIf I Had Legs Iโd Kick You,โ she has made a career of playing characters who are haughty and testy, glamorously difficult and hard to cozy up to. But thatโs part of her pizazz as an actor. Who would want Rose Byrne to give you the warm fuzzies? (Though Iโm betting that if you cast her in a Colleen Hoover soaper, sheโd nail it.) โTowโ is a minor indie that doesnโt always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the filmโs dramatic motor.
At first, we donโt like her at all. After a while, we still donโt (much), but we find ourselves connecting to something in her that transcends likability โ her humanity. Thatโs acting alchemy.
โTowโ is an elongated anecdote based on a true story, but when you see the film you may think: Why couldnโt they have just made this up? Byrne plays Amanda Ogle (pronounced Oh-gle), who is living out of her car in Seattle. Itโs a beat-up 1991 slate-blue Toyota Camry, but the vehicle isnโt just her home; itโs her only friend. She talks on the phone to her teenage daughter in Utah (played by Elsie Fisher, who was so terrific in โEighth Gradeโ), but thatโs her one connection, and itโs hanging by a thread. We never hear the full story of how she got to where she is.
But Amandaโs presence tells us all we need to know. The blonde hair with bangs, put up in a paisley pink kerchief with a plastic flower tucked in, the leather jacket and big dark-pink sunglasses, the snarling scowl of defiance thatโs almost part of the look โย itโs all a bit thrift-shop punk, and so is her attitude. (She has the aura of someone who was a punk and is still trying to figure out how to age into adulthood.) Amanda snaps at everyone, but Byrne has such a quick mind that weโre alive to her insults and doomsday quips. Her invective perks us right up.
The movie is this simple: Amandaโs car gets stolen, then recovered the next day, but itโs being kept at a commercial lot โ Kaplan Towing โ thatโs charging her $273 before she can drive it away. To Amanda, that might as well be $273,000. Sheโs a vet tech who has finally landed employment at a veterinarianโs office, where sheโs supposed to do pick-ups. But she canโt do the job without the car, and she canโt pick up the car without the job. The movie is about how she spends an entire year living as a homeless person trying to get her cruddy Toyota back.
She crashes at a church homeless shelter, with adjacent 12-step meetings, the whole place overseen by Barbara, played by Octavia Spencer with a pitch-perfect compassionate ruthlessness. Amanda then takes her case against Kaplan Towing to court, serving as her own lawyer, and she wins the case! โ but when she arrives back at the lot in triumph, itโs only to find that theyโve already sold the car at auction. She meets a nonprofit lawyer, Kevin (Dominic Sessa), whoโs a saintly geek, and they spend months working on the case. She gets roughed up by the homeless shelterโs resident sociopath (Lea Delaria, who is riveting) and meets comrades like the sweet Nova (Demi Lovato) and the combative Denise (Ariana DeBose), whoโs as difficult as Amanda is.
We learn that Amanda is a recovering alcoholic (seven months sober) who had her first drink at 11 (in reaction, the film implies, to her being abused by her father when she was 10). But instead of filling in her slow slide into parking-lot vagrancy, what the film leaves unspoken is that whatever problems she had were pushed over the edge by an impossible economyย โ which combined, in some way, with her impossible personality. The (minor) strength of โTowโ is that it makes no apologies for Amanda, never pretending that sheโs a functional person. Yet it shows us her flawed heart. If the film has a message, itโs that assholes who have lost everything are people too. Especially when they fight the system.
I just wish that the storyline built to something. I like anecdotal movies, but the fact that Amanda spends a year working to get her car back and, from what we can tell, doing little else starts to make this ragtag โCandideโ of city bureaucracy feels like itโs running in place. Amandaโs car is more than her car; itโs her dignity. But the film never takes the leap into seeing that thinking that way might be part of the problem.
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