Robinson Devor’s strangely engrossing doc, Suburban Fury, centers on Sara Jane Moore, notorious for attempting to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975. Oddly enough, she was the second of two women who tried to murder that same president in the very same month. Just 17 days earlier Manson gang member, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to shoot him.
But Moore was so much more than what the history book footnotes portray her as.
Moore was a conservative mother of two living in the San Francisco suburbs when she became politically motivated because of the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. She was then recruited by the FBI to be an informant, which led her to being radicalized by far-left groups and, ultimately and with no remorse, at the age of 45, fired two shots at the President.
Now, five decades later, she is telling her story, but has insisted that only she be the only person interviewed for the film. Moore proves a fascinating, infuriating, exasperated, cantankerous, impatient, confrontational subject as she sits in a limo atop a San Francisco hill and shares (and refuses to share) things about her life.
Devor has crafted a beguiling cinematic document of a tumultuous time in our history (and one could argue when has any time in U.S. history not been in tumult) when it became clear to one citizen close to the inside, that both President Ford and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller were not elected by the people (Ford was hand-picked by Nixon so he could be pardoned) and were politicos who might lead us to a kind of government where one small conservative group ran the country.
Moore ended up serving 32 years of a life sentence.
Though it’s a doc, the film plays like some of the best of 1970s suspense cinema like Sydney Pollack’s 3 Days of the Condor, Alan J. Pakula’s fictional thriller, The Parallax View and fact- based drama, All the President’s Men.
Suburban Fury is a testament to how people are much more than that one thing they may have done that seems to define them. Moore admits to being three different people at the time of the assassination attempt. And when we really give it a good think, aren’t we all at least three different people, depending on the day?
