‘Suburban Fury’ Review: Sara Jane Moore, Who Tried to Assassinate President Ford, Gets Her Own Self-Centered, Radical-Chic Documentary
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic 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.
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