‘Suburban Fury’ Is Strange, Blinkered, And Very Compelling

On Sept. 22, 1975, 45-year-old Sara Jane Moore fired two bullets at then-President Gerald Ford. They were in San Francisco, outside a hotel. Moore missed her first shot, but seeing an opportunity, took another. She missed that one, too. An ex-Marine named Oliver Sipple, who was behind her in the crowd, tackled Moore before she could try for a third. “I said, the bitch has got a gun,” he later recounted. 

Forty years later, after serving 32 years of her life sentence in federal prison and being released on parole, a CNN journalist asked Moore, “What drove you to try to assassinate President Ford?” The same question is at the heart of Robinson Devor’s documentary Suburban Fury, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2024 and is slated for a wider theatrical release this year. Over the course of several interviews with Moore, the film aims to illuminate the particular set of conditions—state of mind, political belief, personal history, sense of purpose—that drove Moore, who died last year at the age of 95, to pick up a gun and fire it at the president.

Suburban Fury opens with a title card informing us that Moore agreed to participate on the condition that no other interviews were conducted. From the first, we are trapped in her claustrophobic perspective, on which Devor leans to evoke the atmosphere of paranoia that accompanies Moore’s narration. He shoots her through panes of glass, alone in the backseat of a car, in an empty living room. Revisiting important landmarks of the assassination attempt, such as the hotel ballroom where Moore was interrogated after being caught, Devor explicitly borrows from the master of the American paranoid political thriller, Alan J. Pakula: Moore’s diminished figure, a speck against austere right angles, is reminiscent of Woodward and Bernstein clambering up the steps to the Library of Congress in All the President’s Men (1976). These framings contrast with Moore’s labyrinthine, even incoherent, description of her journey from every-woman to would-be assassin. The film announces, basically, that any semblance of order is just that.