SUBURBAN FURY

Robinson Devor’s Suburban Fury has been in the works for some time. In fact, the team sent out a press release all the way back in 2010, announcing that production was underway on a documentary about Sara Jane Moore, the conservative, high society hobnobber, turned FBI informant, turned radical leftist who tried to shoot President Gerald Ford in September 1975 outside San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel. Though no title was revealed, the teaser “Think of it as Errol Morris‘s Mr. Death meets Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation” promised plenty of intrigue.

Fortunately, Suburban Fury has been worth the wait. The inventively crafted film stars the now nonagenarian, almost assassin herself, who guides us through her winding life and its intersection with American history mostly from the back seat of a nondescript car. (Moore was released from prison in 2007, having served 32 years – only to be rearrested in 2019 at the age of 89 on a parole violation, resulting in another six months behind bars.) Though she straightforwardly answers questions and even gamely takes directions from the earnest director offscreen, she also gets testy whenever her version of events is challenged. This is her story, and she’s sticking to it.

We learn about Moore’s unhappy marriage to an unnamed man in the film industry, which prompted her to flee LA with their young son for 60s-era San Francisco – where she soon became the wife of a wealthy doctor in suburban Danville. (We also learn she served in the Women’s Army Corps and took classes at The Actors Studio. Though Moore neglects to mention her other three marriages or the several children she abandoned.) It was in this political hotbed up north that the unassuming chameleon first insinuated herself into current events. She volunteered as an accountant for People In Need (PIN), an organization set up by Randolph Hearst to feed the poor – and hopefully placate the Symbionese Liberation Army that was holding hostage his daughter Patty (naturally, an acquaintance of Moore’s). From there she became involved (intimately) with folks like “Popeye” Jackson, cofounder of the United Prisoners Union, who told the budding activist that he was looking to exchange information to the FBI for an education for his son. (Though Moore also claims that Jackson never became aware that she’d been recruited as an informant herself.)

And through an imagined dialogue in voiceover, we’re even privy to the conversations that went on between the not always reliable narrator and her FBI control agent “Bert Worthington,” voiced by the director. While these sequences are based on Moore’s recollections, Devor also managed to get the cooperation of the FBI during production. (In general, “reality” is in the eye of the viewer.) Add to this an incredible array of contemporaneous under the radar footage, and Moore’s stranger than fiction tale comes to vivid life. (The archive includes clips from the network news stations, and from grassroots lensers to established artists: Sandra Hochman, Agnès Varda and Ira Eisenberg are all name-checked.)

And then there’s the cinematically staged interviews – from creepy noir lighting in the station wagon to a precisely framed conversation in the elaborate hotel ballroom where Moore was interrogated after the foiled attempt; and a Vangelis-influenced score by Devor’s longtime collaborator Paul Matthew Moore (no relation let’s hope). Which allows Suburban Fury to surround its inscrutable star in an evocative shroud of mystery, as she takes us on a thrillingly convoluted journey with no clear direction or motivations in sight. 

Which likewise charmingly confounds the director, who tries desperately to follow along right with us. Moore successfully infiltrates a far-left group, tells a member she’s an FBI informant, and then discloses to her handler that she did just that. Why exactly is anyone’s guess. She gets picked up on an illegal-handgun charge (which she also dutifully reports to “Bert”) the day before the attempted assassination – and within three weeks of Squeaky Fromme’s own go at it – only to be released. But because the police are unable to return the confiscated weapon (she called to ask) Moore is forced to quickly buy another from a right-wing conservative gun dealer; which, luckily for President Ford, turned out to be a defective .38 caliber revolver once owned by a cop.

Though Moore, as far as I know, never took the opportunity to view Suburban Fury before her death in September at the ripe old age of 95, Devor, whose other documentaries include 2007’s controversial Zoo and 2018’s Pow Wow (made in collaboration with Charles Mudede, co-writer on his 2005 breakthrough narrative feature Police Beat), did receive some feedback. According to the Seattle-based director, Moore let him know that she was hopeful but also quite wary that too much research had clouded his outlook. “She also has stated that she feels it will probably not be accurate,” he’s said. Which in the enigmatic world of Sara Jane Moore might just be the ultimate two-thumbs-up review.

– Lauren Wissot