NYFF '24: "Suburban Fury" tells the tall tale of a wannabee Presidential Assassin

by Cláudio Alves

On September 22nd, 1975, just seventeen days after Squeaky Fromme had attempted the same, Sara Jane Moore fired at President Gerald Ford. Neither of the 45-year-old woman's shots hit their target, though she came dangerously close. Had Moore noticed the sight on her revolver was 6 inches misplaced, she might have done it. Such violent actions came less than two years after this housewife from the San Francisco suburbs had been recruited by the FBI as an informant, going into militant groups and becoming radicalized in the process. Her thwarted presidential assassination led to much media hullabaloo, pithy dismissals of Moore as being "off her mind," and a life sentence, of which she served 32 years.

Nearly half a century after the shooting, director Robinson Devor puts her at the center of Suburban Fury, a new documentary where the would-be assassin is given ample opportunity to tell her own story…

Before a single piece of footage breaks through the black screen, Suburban Fury presents a title card whose content is essential for the viewer's understanding of what's to come. It reads: "At her request, Sara Jane Moore was the only person interviewed for this film. The words attributed to FBI agent 'Bert Worthington' are based on Moore's memory of their conversations." One should remember this when, for the next 115 minutes, the doc's protagonist and de facto narrator weaves her tale with nary a rebuttal or additional perspective. One should remember it when Moore, irate at the director's questions, says he should "ask them." Which, of course, is impossible within the limits she set for the filmmakers.

Suburban Fury is full of these contradictions, forever living within the tension between some unreachable truth and Moore's version of the same. That's not to say the film is necessarily about deception or that it's ever fooled. One senses that director Robinson Devor, best known for the non-fiction Zoo, can see right through Moore and guides his camera to do the same. Yet, he never outright calls her out, whether in speech or filmmaking form. For example, Moore is fond of saying she was married to a Hollywood bigshot with much influence in the industry. In truth, one of her five ex-husbands, John O. Aalberg, was a sound technician. A ten-time Oscar-nominated sound technician, but still. You would never know it just from watching Suburban Fury.

Instead, the facts are presented strictly as Moore lays them out, the faint aroma of skepticism emanating from the screen without anything more damning ever materializing. You have to wonder why Devor chose this approach. Perhaps, it was thought that showing evidence of Moore's elisions and creations, her troublesome relationship with fact, might have discredited her too much. After all, through Moore's memories, the director paints a formidable picture of America in the mid-70s, a period of political unrest when paranoia reigned supreme and disillusionment with the systems in place was spreading. Are Moore's little white lies reason enough to undercut such strong points as her outrage over the state's silent approval of the murder of leftist leaders?

And maybe the factual truth of her past isn't the point of the exercise at all. It may seem strange to say this of a documentary feature, but Suburban Fury's intentions seem to go beyond documenting the events it putatively investigates. Just look at how the whole thing is put together. Ghost traveling shots go through empty country roads on the way to the city long before conflicting histories unravel. The mood is fragile, a liminal space between night and day, dusk and dawn, past and present, and heavens knows what else. Uncertainty drips from the image, and even original clips from the 1970s seem drenched in it. As you see decades-old applause, you hear a woman speak of a fugue state, of knowing she'd die only to survive.

Then, there's the way Devor stages Moore when he's not showing us her life through old photographs and newspaper clippings. At first, the nonagenarian is seen in the back seat of a car, being driven around San Francisco, up to a hill overlooking Fog City. The driver is barely seen and there's another man loitering about, keeping watch and smoking cigarette after cigarette. The magic hour gives in to pitch-black night and the cycles go on. We only realize this was a multi-day operation because Moore's costume keeps changing, though it's always elegant, earth tones juxtaposed with leather gloves for a final touch. That final detail is perchance the most revealing regarding the film's priorities. 

One of the first things we ever see Moore do is put on those gloves, completing a picture that would feel at home among the paranoia thrillers that defined 70s American cinema along with the New Hollywood movement and the birth of the blockbuster. When she shifts to sitting in a dark wood-paneled room, brown and bronze as far as the eye can see, with vaulted ceilings above, the game at hand only becomes more apparent. Devor is in dialogue with past iconographies, a culture gone by and the societal anxieties that shaped it. He is synthetizing that decade's unrest in retrospect and problematizing it along the way. The weirdness of applying such strategies to a documentary is the biggest provocation of all.

So, Moore is as much a person as she is a persona, a symbol. Through the camera' gaze, she is a vehicle for cinematic exploration, and an excuse for the resurrection of dead audiovisual grammars, its signifiers, the meanings and reactions they continue to inspire in the viewer. That further means that Sara Jane Moore becomes an abstraction at the center of a film that's, in its simplest form, her memoirist monologue. However, the slipperiness of her figure seems to be the point, a willful consequence rather than some accident. Just as she constructs her myth, so did America create a mythos for its past. They reflect each other and Suburban Fury is the light caught between two mirrors face to face.

Intellectually stimulating as this might be, it's also a frustrating watch. Moreover, the film seems self-aware about that as it is about most things. Even the distance between the filmmaking device and its subject is baked into the construction, calling attention to itself. In the car, the director always reaches out through radio, and, when filming Moore in a modernist house, the camera peers at her through the windows and Devor's voice once again manifests indirectly, a message from a faraway place. This makes their more combative moments into absurdist comedy before reaching near-Brechtian levels of alienation. Whatever the case, truth teller or fabulist, Sara Jane Moore is a fascinating figure and, in that regard, Suburban Fury does her justice.

The big screen and its intermediaries don't so much reveal as they deepen the mystery. Bizarre as that might be, there's value in a cinema that confounds above a cinema that ties every string, cogent and conventional. The friction between History and the individual is worth watching, including those whose names are mentioned in History books, even if only as footnotes. Even when it remains unresolved. And even if Suburban Fury might leave one frustrated, it also promotes a feeling of disquiet that should be worth appreciating on its own. Don't go looking for an education in this movie, because you won't find it, much less an explanation. Take it on its terms, and you will find something worthwhile.

Suburban Fury played in the Main Slate of the 62nd NYFF.