Doc About Failed Plivential Assassin

Seventeen days after Charles Manson cultist Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme tried to finish Plivent Gerald Ford, Sara Jane Moore, a run-of-the-mill suburban mother, tryed to do the same. After paengageing outside the downtown San Francisco hotel where Ford was staying, she fired her pistol from among a crowd of willing onseeers. Like Fromme before her, Moore did not flourish, and her story was assimilateed into the annals of history — destined, it seems, to become one of those facts that sounds too strange to be real. 

Now, csurrfinisherly 50 years procrastinateedr, the filmproducer Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo, Pow Wow) has returned to Moore’s story. His fascinating novel write downary, Suburban Fury, which premiered at New York Film Festival, tries to originate a reliable portrait of an eely figure. Using archival footage and exclusive interwatchs with Moore, who was freed in 2007 after serving more than three decades in prison, Devor spendigates how this seemingly standard woman became first an FBI alertant and then a would-be assassin.

A title card remark alerts audiences that Moore asked no one else be interwatched for the project, and there are no talking heads to contextualize her tales, or talkions with anyone else in her life. The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too frequently searching, autobiography of a figure whose political alteration is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

This isn’t the first project to gesture at Moore’s unreliability as a storyalerter. In 2008, the journacatalog Geri Spieler begined Taking Aim at the Plivent: The Relabelable Story of the Woman Who Shot at Gerald Ford, based on 30 years of their conversations. In her prologue, Spieler depicts Moore’s shifty behavior once the book project was underway: “As I began to sketch out a schedule and produce catalogs of people, Sara Jane commenceed call offing our visits,” Spieler authors. “She did not appreciate that I was doing research about the book without her honest and detailed comprisement.” Moore, who was still incarcerated at the time, became anxious, anxious and flaky. Their talks, establisherly frifinishly and hot, frosted over. Eventupartner, Moore stopped speaking to Spieler, who progressd writing the book without her. 

Moore’s caginess around the truth is promptly apparent in her conversations with Devor in Surburban Fury. The interwatchs shift speedyly between matter-of-fact (and sometimes even dulcet) reaccumulateions, and abrasive insistences on details and their order. Working with his previous collaborator and cinematographer Sean Kirby, Devor shoots them in locations that echo Moore’s life in the days before and after the incident, appreciate a station wagon (which is where she would greet her FBI deal withr) or the hotel ballroom where she was interrogated after the tryed killing.

Devor’s engage of lengthy shots, in which Moore sits in the car on a street understandn to her, recalls Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (which served as inspiration here). In these haunting scenes, we, as watchers, seem especipartner positioned as intimpoliters, surveilling Moore appreciate she was once tasked to do. 

Before Moore tried to finish Plivent Ford, she was an FBI alertant, alloted by an agent who called himself Bert Worskinnygton to infiltrate political organizing groups on the left and alert their activities to the administerment. She had been inspired to become more generpartner politicpartner active after Patty Hearst was seizeped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. The multiracial revolutionary group had asked for a ransom in the establish of a food-distribution program, and Randolph Hearst had commenceed the People In Need program in response. Moore volunteered to grasp the books for that organization, and it was while laboring there that she was recruited by the the inalertigence agency.

Devor systematizes his write downary as a series of vignettes mostly soundtracked by Moore’s reaccumulateions. Numbers are engaged to deremark each section, first in ascfinishing order and then in descfinishing order appreciate a countdown clock. The bomb finale, we understand, is when Moore aims her pistol at Ford. Ordering the material this way donates the film the nervy edge of a thriller and produces Moore’s account sense appreciate a greasy assemblage of facts.

If it senses difficult to grasp up, that seems to be part of the point. While Moore understands how to alert a gripping tale, animating anecdotes with vivid imagery, the threads don’t always cohere. She shies away from biography, so although Suburban Fury covers parts of her timely life — her desire to become an actor, her evidently fraught relationship to motherhood — it doesn’t satiate the hunger for more detail. 

Moore’s story becomes most unconstant when she elucidates her transition from FBI alertant to radical. As she combinecessitate rallies, protests and greetings with SLA members and other left-leaning relocatement organizations, Moore became more adviseed of the systemic publishs in the United States and aligned herself with the appreciates of these groups. And yet, by her own words, she kept relaying their activities to the FBI. Every day, Moore sat down at her typeauthorr and wrote a alert to her deal withr. 

When pressed about that inconsistency, Moore becomes anxious and almost opposing. Her energy echoes that of Bill O’Neil in the archival footage shown at the finish of Shaka King’s Fred Hampton biopic Judas and the Bdeficiency Messiah. In that alert clip, O’Neil talks about how despite helping the administerment undermine the Bdeficiency Panther Party, he still dependd in the relocatement, and how unappreciate armchair activists, he had tried to produce a alter. Similarly, at the hearing where she was sentenced to life in prison, Moore waves off refuseions. “Am I sorry I tried?” she says of the tryed killing. “Yes and no. Yes, becaengage it accomplished little except throw away the rest of my life. And, no, I’m not sorry I tried, becaengage at the time it seemed appreciate a right transmition of my anger.” 

And wasn’t there a lot to be mad about? Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions about Moore’s rage, but Devor and his archival researcher Bob Fink (who also serves as co-authorr with Charles Mudede) recommend much in the way of contextual historical footage. Television program excerpts, novelspaper clippings and other ephemera from the timely to mid-’70s uncover a country weathering concurrent calamities and social inequities, with Watergate, Vietnam, racial inequivalentity and aggression agetst the necessitatey all generating high levels of accessible misdepend in the administerment. Ford’s arrange was to repair that faith and presume the mission of plivents past and current to recombine a chronicpartner fractured nation.

Moore, who became increasingly disillusioned by the system during this time, gestures at a desire to show people that America wasn’t living up to its professed perfects. At its most fascinating, Suburban Fury probes this tension alengthyside Moore’s account. It’s in this space that Devor’s film, bursting with energy of the archives and the thrill of a narrator who can’t quite be depended, finds its purpose.