THE STORY – After more than thirty years in prison, Sara Jane Moore recalls her path from FBI informant to thwarted assassin in her first interview since her attempted killing of Gerald Ford.
THE CAST – Sara Jane Moore
THE TEAM – Robinson Devor (Director/Writer), Bob Fink & Charles Mudede (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 115 minutes
Sara Jane Moore looks like your favorite aunt, and like your favorite aunt, she has a wilder history than you might expect. Moore’s respectable appearance and matter-of-fact way of speaking belie the fact that she was a radical in the 1960s and 70s and was arrested and given a life sentence for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. And if she had known that the sights on her gun were slightly off, she would have been successful.
Robinson Devor’s new documentary about her, “Suburban Fury,” opens with a piece of onscreen text that should immediately put the audience on edge, noting that at her request, Moore was the only person interviewed for the film. Devor takes this handicap and runs with it, allowing Moore to tell her version of events and recording some narration himself as the voice of Moore’s FBI handler based on her recollections of their conversations. While it starts with a straightforward telling of Moore’s story surrounded by archival footage to put it into context, “Suburban Fury” grows more complicated as it goes, and the cracks in Moore’s story start to show. If you’re looking to understand Sara Jane Moore more deeply, this film may prove frustrating. However, as a cultural commentary, Devor’s film proves far richer, especially in the context of the current political moment.
Looking at Moore, even in pictures from the ‘50s and ‘60s, you’d never guess where she’d end up. Her image as an almost Donna Reed-like housewife probably helped her land a Hollywood exec for a husband (she declines to name him, saying that it’s not important), but he didn’t want to have a child, so she left for Danville, in the East Bay Area, after she got pregnant. She met a doctor there, and they pragmatically decided to marry based on each other’s social suitability. When Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army to protest what they saw as the oligarchy of newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, Moore became a bookkeeper for People In Need, the organization Hearst set up to meet the kidnappers’ demand that he feed the poor. While there, she dealt with the FBI enough that she passed information to them from the radical Popeye Jackson.
According to her, she was sympathetic to the plight of radical groups trying to make social change and simultaneously informed a handler from the FBI she only knew as Bertran Worthington of the things they talked about at meetings. To hear Moore tell it, the more time she spent in these radical groups, the more she came to understand and support what they were fighting for, to the point of telling them she was an informant and apologizing. When the FBI said they couldn’t protect her if she continued to attend meetings after coming clean, she took it as a threat to her life. All of these forces collided on Sept. 22, 1975, when she got a gun and decided to shoot the President.
This is all Moore’s version of events, though. As she gets deeper into her story, Devor challenges her story, both in his direct questions and through the archival materials that have so far served solely to situate her story in the context of the political and social events happening in the country at the time. Newspaper articles about the people she informed on and television news reports about her from after the assassination attempt constantly call her recollections into question, with many saying that her involvement in these groups was part and parcel of her need for attention and to feel important. The more we learn about her past, the more this seems to be true, but whenever Devor presses her with his direct questions, she gets combative, insisting that details about her former husbands and the children she abandoned are irrelevant to the story she’s telling. While they may be irrelevant to the story of the assassination attempt, they’re incredibly relevant to painting a portrait of her life and understanding what led her down such a radical path. Her evasiveness takes on a different tone the more we hear from the voices of the time, but given what we know about attitudes towards women in the early ‘70s, how much should we take their words over hers? Devor doesn’t take a stance on this, which will frustrate some and intrigue others. The more complex Moore’s story becomes, the more she starts to contradict herself, and while she can explain away all of Devor’s protestations, is her frustration that of someone who doesn’t feel she’s being heard, the frustration of someone being confronted with on their lies, or the frustration of an elderly person who happens to not be expressing themselves in the clearest way? With Moore being the only interview subject, there’s no way to know, leaving it up to the viewer to determine her trustworthiness.
Devor heightens the feeling of intrigue by shooting the film like a spy thriller. Most of Moore’s interviews are filmed in a town car, with men in suits and shades always visible in the background. At one point, she nervously turns her head at even the tiniest sound, giving a feeling of danger to the whole enterprise. With the film’s chapters being announced with the force of a countdown, the film achieves incredible momentum as it goes, with Moore’s increasingly feisty attitude adding fuel to the fire. If Devor ends up splitting the difference between a full-throated defense of Sara Jane Moore as a misunderstood victim of the times (Moore claims her mixture of “innocence and stupidity” as a well-off white woman gave her the “good name on the streets” that put her in the FBI’s sights) and a takedown of the woman’s self-serving grandstanding, at least he mines both sides for compelling material, giving the audience plenty to think about and debate. “Suburban Fury” may prove frustrating while watching for its inability to provide straight answers, but that very same quality ensures it will stick in your brain for weeks afterward.
