New York Film Festival 2024

[Chris Knipp]

A SCENE WITH A PLYMOUTH FURY STATION WAGON FROM SUBURBAN FURY

ROBINSON DEVOR: SUBURBAN FURY (2024)

"Suburban Fury" examines the 1975 assassination attempt on U.S. President Gerald Ford by Sara Jane Moore, a conservative, middle-aged, single mother from the San Francisco suburbs who became radicalized while working as an FBI informant. World premiere at the NYFF.

On September 22, 1975, only 17 days after Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to kill President Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore made another attempt on the President with a pistol she'd bought that morning, in Union Square, in San Francisco. She missed with her first shot, and a bystander who tackled her stopped her from making a second shot. The pistol turned out to have had a faulty sight, and she was aiming from 40 feet away. Moore was sentenced to life and served 32 years, which is standard, from age 45 to age 77. Filmmaker Robinson Devor's choice was to interview Moore, who is now in her nineties, and the interview runs through this film, which has other unseen speakers and a wealth of archival material. One of their inspirations is to stage the interview partly in the middle of a posh looking room and partly in the back seat of a Plymouth Fury station wagon, after which the film is named.

Whatever age she was when interviewed by the filmmakers (Devor reports being at work on this film since 2010), Sara is a lively and feisty lady, in possession of her faculties, who sometimes loses patience, finding their questions repetitive or clueless. It is retrospectively somewhat astonishing that at her advanced age, and after 32 years in prison (with one brief escape after several years), she is so self possessed and sure of herself. She may have been nutty, certainly unwise, but she stands by her past decisions, at least here. There is a book about her, Taking Aim at the President, that was published in 2009 by Geri Spieler, the author reportedly having been in correspondence with her for 28 years. In the Wikipedia article about her, Sara is quoted as having first stood by her action, and then decided it was unwise.

The film revolves around and is anchored by Sara Jane Moore's failed assassination attempt, but but one can argue that its real subject is the radicalism and general mood of chaos and experimentalism of that period, of which this is a colorful but none-too flattering picture. There is a moment in Moore's very checkered and patchwork career that she does volunteer work for the Black Panthers in Oakland. A wealth of archival footage flows by - so much it may slip by you. One thing that seems to have influenced Sara was the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst, and Sara somehow was acquainted with the Hearst family. She was no doubt impressed by Patty Hearst's joining up with her radical captors of the Symbionese Liberation Army, who persuaded her wealthy family to donate $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area for one year in a project called People in Need. Radical politics still reigned at Berkeley. Nixon resigned in 1974 in disgrace from the Watergate scandal, and President Ford granted him a full pardon. It did not escape notice that neither Ford nor his plutocrat Vice President, Nelson A. Rockefeller, had been democratically elected.

Things seem to unfold in no particular order other than chronological in the film, a randomness that is effective after a stalling of the pace early on. Sara Moore had become an FBI informant. How she was recruited we don't know. What she informed isn't very clear, but we hear the voice of an anonymous FBI officer who may have been in charge of her. She talks about being lured into attraction to agents while the agent remained cold and businesslike. she learned to write up everything she did and everyone she saw, even the food she ate, in daily FBI reports that went on even after she was no longer officially serving the Agency.

The filmmakers are little concerned with Sara Jane Moore as a private person. Do they mention that she was trained as an accountant? Only some way through we hear her describe having received military training. You must go to Wikipedia to learn that she had already been divorced five times and had four children before her involvement with the FBI and radical politics began. Though the portrait of seventies radicalism is suggestive, since this is after all grounded by an interview with Sara Jane Moore, shouldn't there be as rounded and complete a picture of her as possible? In particular, one would like to know more about her social origins. Had she been upwardly mobile? What about her education? Her earlier behavior? Do other people remember her? In trying to do something artful, which it is - and one can imagine a feature film inspired by this one - the filmmakers have fallen a little short on some of the basics of documentary, the providing of full information. This is background on the period and a record of Sara Jane Moore in the flesh, but there seems to remain lots more to know.

A SFIFF summary (for DOC Stories, coming October 17—20, 2024) suggests it’s the intention of this film to keep it "impossible to separate fact from fiction here," and to showcase a "teasingly unreliable narrator and thus "ruminate" upon the "very idea of documentary portraiture." Okay; but it's still a documentary portrait and it could be a more thorough one.

Suburban Fury, 115 mins., is premiering at the NYFF, where it will be screened for this review. There was a Q&A for the press with the filmmakers. This was also scheduled as closing night film for DOC Stories in San Francisco Oct. 20.

Showtimes
Wednesday, October 9
6:15 PMStandby Only
Thursday, October 10
9:00 PMBuy Tickets
Sunday, October 13
9:00 PMBuy Tickets


SARA JANE INTERVIEW IN SUBURBAN FURY