It’s one of the wilder footnotes in modern American history: At 3:30pm on the afternoon of September 22, 1975, a conservative 46-year-old single mom named Sara Jane Moore attempted to assassinate the President of the United States on the street outside of San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. And she didn’t miss by much — had Moore known that the sights on her newly acquired .38 caliber revolver were off by six inches, the first of the two bullets she fired would have struck Gerald Ford directly in the head (the second, disrupted by the former Marine standing next to her, hit a nearby taxi driver who would also survive the attack).
President Ford would later declare that his assailant was “off her mind,” but Moore insisted upon her sanity throughout the sentencing process. In fact, never in her life had she been more sure of her purpose. While only 19 months had passed since the F.B.I. recruited her as an informant, that was plenty long enough for Moore to become radicalized against the American government she had ostensibly been tapped to serve. By the time she pulled the trigger on that fateful early fall afternoon, Moore was convinced that violence was the country’s only remaining path towards justice.
Robinson Devor’s “Suburban Fury” prefers to frame Moore’s failed murder attempt as a bid to reconcile the tension between her conservative upbringing and her emergent radicalism. In that respect at least, this formally unusual documentary paints its subject as a microcosm for the country that produced her; it sees her as a largely — if not exclusively — political construction, downplaying the psychology behind her actions even as the film’s basic structure is shaped around the 93-year-old Moore’s lifelong penchant for agitated self-mythologizing, which seems to have regained whatever luster it may have lost while she was in prison (Moore was released on parole in 2007, and published a memoir called “Taking Aim at the President” two years later).
Fascinating and frustrating in almost perfectly equal measure, “Suburban Fury” starts off by explaining its subject’s rules of engagement. “At her request,” the text reads, “Sara Jane Moore was the only person interviewed for this film.” The words attributed to her (still anonymous but presumably dead) F.B.I. control agent “Bert Worthington,” whose droning and disembodied voice narrates brief portions of this documentary, are based on nothing beyond Moore’s memory of their interactions.
Despite the fact that Devor complements Moore’s straight-to-camera storytelling with a deep wealth of archival footage (including interviews), and that he includes several instances in which Moore snaps at her director for pressing her with follow-up questions or daring to interrupt her train of thought, this film is ultimately the portrait of a well-preserved nonagenarian as she talks to herself for the better part of two hours. And while Moore doesn’t appear to be in an evident state of decline, that doesn’t mean her version of events can be taken at face value.
This is a story that she’s told and retold so many times over the years that it’s gradually come to resemble itself more than it does an accurate reflection of her thinking at the time, and its various elisions (e.g. her general listlessness and the three children she abandoned before keeping the fourth) seem just as telling as the occasional bits that feel studiously well-rehearsed. The longer that Moore speaks, bumbling down the many pathways of her mind without any real knack for narrative cohesion or compelling detail, the clearer it becomes that “Suburban Fury” is much less substantive as a generational study of political unrest than it is as a messy — but topical! — sketch of the relationship between the history of America and the pathology of its citizens.
Artfully posing his subject around the city of San Francisco (often in the backseat of a car, sometimes in more historically relevant places), Devor is happy to let Moore talk. We hear his voice buzz in whenever his subject needs a prompt or some bumper lanes, but he interrupts just often enough for us to imagine how difficult it must have been for him to cut all of these curlicue anecdotes into a semi-coherent account. Any editorializing is strictly ambient, even as Devor assembles his archival footage — some of which was shot by the likes of Agnès Varda and Sandra Hochman — into a vivid overview of 1970s unrest, no part of which is flattering to the U.S. government. While unopposed to Moore’s argument that America seldom prosecutes the murders of leftist revolutionaries like Fred Hampton, “Suburban Fury” would appear to be less concerned with her politics than it is in studying where and how they intersected with her narcissism.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s very damning and a little funny that even the most peripheral exposure to the post-COINTELPRO F.B.I. was enough to radicalize a disengaged suburbanite into supporting Cesar Chavez and sympathizing with the Symbionese Liberation Army after they kidnapped Patty Hearst. (The story of Moore’s connection to Hearst’s parents, and how it led to her being on the government’s radar in the first place, is one of several key details that she hopelessly jumbles in this telling.)
Moore’s resentment towards an unelected president is perfectly valid, and it’s easy to appreciate why the former nurse threw her hat in with the “women’s libbers” after one of her five ex-husbands refused to let her re-enter the workforce. But neither the interview testimony in this film nor her actions in the ’70s do much to suggest that Moore’s radical awakening — the film’s press notes dare to use the “w” word — was motivated by a particularly vested interest in the treatment of America’s most oppressed citizens, an impression supported by the regret that Moore would later express in prison.
Impressions will vary, and mine have definitely been colored by a 1975 Time Magazine article that depicts Moore as a bored dilettante who managed to annoy people on both sides of the F.B.I. operation from which she defected (though the fact that the article starts by calling her “dumpy” gives me reason to suspect that its misogyny might not have only been skin-deep).
“For the first time in my life I felt fully engaged in something,” Moore confesses to Devor’s camera, launching into an oral memoir about how she clung to that engagement at all costs as she made increasingly risky and dramatic choices to inflate her importance and keep herself in the spotlight. That’s a curious strategy for an informant, to say the least, and one that the abstractions of this film’s voice-driven approach makes impossible to pin down; rarely has a documentary left me so desperate for dramatic recreations or any other device that might anchor it with some physical weight.
Moore’s paranoia is belied by her flair for embellishment, a tendency best summed up by her continued insistence that one of her ex-husbands was a Hollywood bigshot who’s too famous for her to name in public (he was an uncredited sound technician on “Citizen Kane”). Even the parts of her story that would be wrong and baseless to doubt cast a strange light on the woman telling it; at one point she claims that a well-known musician was originally assigned to assassinate Ford, and that — after the musician raped her — she volunteered to commit the murder herself because she didn’t want the killer’s fame to obscure the political message that killing a president would send.
The psychological machinations behind that choice are infinitely complex, but Moore’s inability and/or unwillingness to interrogate them leave us to guess at our own answers. She remembers thinking that her attack would be successful, and that she would be shot down by the cops on the spot, and I suppose that sheds a mote of light on her state of mind. A cynical read would suggest that she was struggling to find a role that suited her self-importance, and leapt at the chance to write her name into our national story. A more generous interpretation might argue that she felt like America needed a wake-up call, and — for whatever reason — took it upon herself to be the one who made it.
“Suburban Fury” doesn’t privilege one view over another; its strange title, which seems to belong to a much different movie, might be the most emotionally clarifying thing about it. Then again, the emotions of its subject may be something of a red herring when all is said and done. What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.
Grade: B-
“Suburban Fury” premiered at the 2024 New York Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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