Directed By Stephen Laing

Starring – Rose Byrne, Dominic Sessa, Simon Rex

The Plot – The true story of Amanda Ogle (Byrne), a homeless Seattle woman who fought her way out of tow-company hell to reclaim her life and car after receiving a tow bill for $21,634.

Rated R for adult language and some sexual references.

Tow | Official Trailer | In Theaters March 20

POSITIVES

Regardless of how fantastically exaggerated cinema can craft their fictional stories, there’s never quite anything that even comes close to the audaciously bitter and ruthlessly unforgiving authenticity of a true story narrative, particularly one that thoroughly documents the uphill struggles that homeless people face towards even surviving to live another day, all the while grappling with the inequality and abuse from corporations and outsider perspectives who take advantage of their instability. In only his second feature length direction in a mostly TV-dominated career that spans nearly thirty years, Laing fearlessly takes aim at a true story that feels too bizarre and downright ridiculous to feel legitimate, and it not only serves as a stark reminder to the economical bullying that the wealthy take towards exploiting the holes in an imperfect judicial system, but also inscribes some much-needed empathy for those continuously kicked down by life, who find grave difficulty in the effortless actions that we take for granted every single day. This goes double for someone like Amanda, who Laing paints responsibly with an air imperfection to her alcoholic morality and false projection to outsiders that feels like the cause of all of her struggles, but one who sensitively attains the kind of necessary investment from the audience, on account of the constant one step forward and two steps back that life gives her during those rare moments when she’s able to find victories in even the smallest things, and between the thoroughness of the script dissecting Amanda’s situational conflicts with being a long-distance parent to a daughter continuously heartbroken by her broken promises, as well as monumentally measuring her stolen automobile to feel Earth-shattering to someone who literally lives and sleeps inside of it, the stakes feel epic to someone so confined to the barest of essentials to get through another terrifying night, with many of the initial opening sequences to the movie illustrating the grave discomforts that come from living so vulnerably. This and the movie’s drama designation certainly make it feel like a sternly serious movie that a quality actress like Byrne could effortlessly bring to life, but Laing’s strongest directorial element is that he constantly makes the atmospheres inside of his narrative effortlessly digestible to the audience, on account of some quirkily zany humor that is authentically registered in some of these bafflingly ludicrous situations that Amanda finds herself in, without anything that feels heavily manufactured cinematically to feel like it stands out like a sore thumb to the authenticity of the material. This is really where Byrne shows her best stuff, as her comedically experienced career lends itself accordingly to the internalizing of her responses that vividly capture the frustration and ironies of her continuous attempts to get ahead, all the while the presentation and consistency of the editing attains this upbeat and snappily affectionate personality (Especially when Sessa’s character moves into frame) that keeps the depths of this one year odyssey towards feeling like a wet blanket involving one gut punch after another to this woman’s suffering. While this is clearly a case of substance over style, with regards to the many aspects in and around Amanda that vividly capture her story, it’s great to see Laing take the opportunity to elevate his television sensibilities with some stunning uses of the lens that entice enamoring to the overall presentation, particularly the intricate meaning of individual framing inside of Vanja Cernjul’s cinematography that candidly conveys the deviation of environments that Amanda’s journey takes along the way. During these moments, Cernjul’s artistic impulses opt for a first person over the shoulder perspective that not only vividly immerses us in Amanda’s overwhelming plight during moments of isolated anxiety for the character, but also uses it to coherently contrast advantageous insight into the distanced worlds between her and her daughter, with surrounding set designs and backdropped landscapes that not only defines the isolation factor of a little woman in a big city, but also further values the unbreakable bond between Mother and daughter, in that the latter continues to hang onto conversations with her mom, instead of living in this privileged paradise. Lastly, the performances do a lot to bring these characters to life, especially our leading lady’s seamless disappearing act into the role of Amanda, with her blonde stacked hair and prosthetic chompers on full display. Following up her Oscar nomination in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Byrne revels in dissecting the complexities and multitudes that come with motherhood and womanhood, respectively, with her sensitive chronicling of Amanda’s eventual relapse showing vital restrain towards unnecessary dramatics, in order to enact a more grounded and humanistic approach. But even when Byrne taps into the comedic sensibilities of opportunities that she unloads so effectively, they never come at the cost of the stakes that feel so crucial to her overcoming, and I for one am elated that Byrne is finally getting the opportunities as an actress that she has always deserved. She’s rounded out by memorable supporting turns in everyone from Dominic Sessa, to Simon Rex, to especially
Adriana DeBose, who each unload so much grace and genuineness to their respective turns that help keep the aforementioned atmosphere uplifting instead of unrelenting, without a single one of them standing out uninterestingly in the ways Amanda’s story constantly deviates off of each of them.

NEGATIVES

As the film delves deeper into its second half, it becomes painfully apparent that the script from Jonathan Keasey and Brant Boivin suffers from tumultuous tedium, on account of the many subplots and underwhelming impacts that misfire to fill its time, and while I commend the writer’s intentions to maximize the scope of this world beyond that of simply just Amanda’s perspective, it comes at the cost to the overall pacing of the movie, which feels chaotically rushed throughout the last forty-five minutes. Considering this is a breezily brisk 100-minute runtime, and the movie is constantly introducing subplots as late as the movie’s final half hour, it unavoidably forces the engagement to work overtime towards making some of these surmising conflicts feel naturally introduced and resolved within the proper allowance of time to reality, such as Amanda’s eventual coming to terms with her alcoholism, and though the film is right to include these matters, their springing relief comes at the cost of gauging the magnitude of what our protagonist is facing, making them feel like periodic bumps in the road, instead of life-threatening circumstances that she struggles to extinguish from her lifestyle. When you consider that this movie takes place over the course of a year in the life of this homeless woman, you’re treated to abruptly swift time jumps that leave us feeling a bit disconnected to the extent of the character’s plight, with a Wikipedia kind of documentation that periodically has this film feeling like a series of bullet points to continuously nail, and it makes me wish that Tow was a series instead of a film, in order to spend ample time fleshing out those character-building moments that lead to a bigger picture in development. Beyond the alienating of a brisk screenplay with attention-deficit disorder, the film also falls suspect to these establishing shot transitions between scenes involving either a dog in a bathtub, surrounded by seasonal decorations to represent the passage of time in the movie, or the personal insight of Amanda’s daily journal entries that clue us into her mentality heading into these meaningful moments. Both of these seem harmless enough to the overall presentation, but they become strange when you consider that the former spawned from a throwaway scene during the movie’s opening act, where Amanda applies for a job that she ultimately never shows up for, and the latter is first introduced at around the midway point of the movie, without anything in the foreground of the narrative articulating that she has a journal, or even a remote bit of internalized honesty about her situational predicament, so it instead ends up coming across as a tedious gimmick that the movie becomes exhausting in keeping up, where one would’ve been enough, but two has this feeling like a multiple-person directed effort that was handed off somewhere in transition. Finally, while most of the performances surmise something beneficial to the movie’s appeal, there are a couple of regrettably forgettable turns that squander such a deep cast of reputably familiar faces, such as Octavia Spencer and Corbin Bernsen, who are each relegated to types, instead of living, breathing people. That assessment is a bit more difficult to make with Spencer, who essentially comes across as the disciplinarian to Amanda’s careless lifestyle, but there’s never an attempt to dig deeper with her character in the same ways that the script attempted with DeBose and Lovato’s characters, so she instead is nothing more than the judge, jury, and executioner of consequence, which I guess required an Academy Award winning actress to helm her. As for Bernsen, he’s cast as the corporate elitist initiated to respond crudely to Amanda’s legal threats, and between a majority of Bernsen’s scenes quite literally phoning it in, on a phone and far away from the setting of Seattle, and his outline feeling so one-dimensionally cartoonish, it serves as the singular example where the movie’s light and frothy atmosphere becomes a bit too bittersweet, for a role that feels like a child’s perspective of rich person snobbery.

OVERALL
Tow is an authentically honest and audaciously eye-opening feel-good dramedy that centers around one woman’s year-long legal battle with the system that ultimately wronged her, exploiting the poverty disadvantages that stall her once situational optimism. Energized by an infectiously charismatic turn from Rose Byrne, as well as unforeseen artistry among documenting the many diverse environments involved in Amanda’s detriment, director Stephen Laing is able to overcome the shallowly squandered beats to the script’s overstuffed outline, delivering a high-mileage vehicle for justice with a lot going under the hood, but one that ultimately gets the audience where they need to go

My Grade: 7.2 or B-