Sara Jane Moore Gets Her Own Radical-Chic Documentary

I went into “Suburban Fury,” a documentary about Sara Jane Moore, who tried to assassinate President Gerald R. Ford in 1975 (she failed, due mostly to a faulty gun), not knowing much about her and never having given a lot of thought, frankly, to that particular freak spasm of 1970s violence. (There were a lot of them, like the Patty Hearst kidnapping, which is intimately linked to Moore’s story.) Moore, at the time, seemed the unlikeliest of assassins — a 45-year-old single mother who looked like she could have been played by Maureen Stapleton. The question that hangs over any shooting like this one is “Why?” (Assuming you think the answer stands apart from the person in question being seriously mentally ill.) And that question really lingered over the Moore case. Yet “Suburban Fury” does that rare thing and offers a highly specific motivation for Moore’s infamous crime.

Only one person is interviewed in the entire film, and that person is Sara Jane Moore. (That was the deal she struck with the filmmaker, Robinson Devor: that he would feature no one else on camera.) Moore, even in her 90s, is quite the babbling brook — twinkly and self-possessed, a calm pathological narcissist, the kind of person who spins out her life like a novel, making stories she’s told a million times sound spontaneous. Her memory is often capricious and, at times, contradictory, but when she states, categorically, that she was never insane, she says it with such patrician nonchalance that it’s hard, for a moment, not to believe her.

So why, standing in a crowd outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975, did Moore try to kill President Ford? To fully understand that, you need to know her extraordinary backstory, which is all there in the film, told out of order as if this were some sinister glinting puzzle of an espionage thriller.

We learn how Moore, born in Charleston, West Virginia, in 1930 (she liked to imply, falsely, that she was a Southern aristocrat), was married and divorced five times (twice to the same man), and how she had four children, most of whom she abandoned. How she moved to Danville, California, 40 minutes outside San Francisco, and became engrossed in the Patty Hearst kidnapping case. How when Patty’s father, Randolph A. Hearst, tried to placate the kidnappers — those dregs-of-the-revolution ragtag-psycho guerrillas the Symbionese Liberation Army — by starting the PIN program to give away $2 million in groceries throughout the state, Moore signed on as an accountant for the program. How she became radicalized (like Patty, she identified with the SLA and its leader, Cinqe) and joined other underground left-wing groups in the Bay Area. And how, even in the midst of that fervor, she was recruited to be an informant for the FBI, a mission she performed dutifully, reporting on what went on inside those groups.

Moore’s attempt to kill Ford grew out of the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam, post-counterculture funk of the ’70s — the tumult of hopelessness and rage, the cynicism that had settled over everything like a damp fog. And here was her reasoning. When Ford stepped in after the resignation of Richard Nixon, choosing New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice-president, we now had, for the first time, an unelected president and vice-president. Rockefeller was the poster boy for the wealthy WASP establishment, and in 1971 he’d presided over the disastrous response to the Attica prison uprising. This dovetailed with one of the key political revelations of the ’70s: the litany of assassination and coup attempts in foreign nations instigated by the CIA, not to mention the FBI’s collusion in the murder of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Moore thought, “I’m just doing what they’re doing.” Her logic was: If she killed Ford, and Nelson Rockefeller became president, Rockefeller was such a transparently bad egg that it would reveal just how rotten the whole system was. Remember the Twinkie defense? I think this could be called the Noam Chomsky-on-acid defense.

Along the way, the documentary shows us just how many crossed wires there were in Sara Jane Moore. In 1950, when she was 19, she collapsed in front of the White House in a bout of “amnesia,” which is telling, since she comes off not so much as a person with memory issues as someone who contrived identities, shedding them the way a snake sheds its skin. In her 20s, she studied acting with Lee Strasberg. (We see publicity stills of her in silky outfits, and she has the poised beauty of someone who might have made it in Hollywood.) Despite her radicalization, she remained as committed to her FBI work, writing out lengthy reports each day, as she was to her causes, and this sense of shooting off in two polar-opposite ideological directions at once echoes the psychotic torn personality of Lee Harvey Oswald (something the film never takes note of).

Then throw a couple of timely cataclysms into the mix. Patty Hearst, who loomed so large in Moore’s transformation, was arrested on September 18, 1975, just four days before Moore’s attempt on Ford’s life. As for Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the former Charles Manson acolyte who also tried to assassinate President Ford…that incident took place just 17 days before Moore’s attempt. Was Moore’s a copycat crime? The film never raises the possibility, though it’s hard to avoid conjecturing that that was a dimension of it.

Moore’s demeanor, in the archival clips we see from around the time of the assassination attempt, and in the interviews she did for the film (where she’s eerily well-preserved, with vibrant skin and graying curls), remains haughty and unapologetic. The very premise of “Suburban Fury,” with Moore interviewed in ironic period settings like the back seat of a ’70s station wagon, makes her seem a classic performative personality — a woman who descended into the darkness out of a need for attention. What’s odd about “Suburban Fury,” even as it holds you with a kind of rapt tension, is that the film’s point-of-view is so limited to Sara Jane Moore’s rationalization of her own life that the movie, by the end, almost flirts with endorsing Moore’s defense of her actions: that she tried to kill the president as a trigger for social justice. Then again, believing that to be true might just be what insanity looks like from the inside.