Suburban Fury (2024 | USA | 118 minutes | Robinson Devor)
One of the best entries from the Seattle International Film Festival Northwest Connections program last year was situated 800 miles south on I-5 and a half century in the past. A refreshingly unconventional biography of Sarah Jane Moore reveals the story of one of two women who independently attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford while he campaigned for election in California. Eschewing typical documentary conventions, the twist tale of the would-be assassin is told by the subject herself, having been released from prison 32 years into serving her life sentence.
Although it wasn’t filmed locally, Suburban Fury has a strong local pedigree. Written, produced, and directed by local documentarian Robinson Devor (Zoo, Pow Wow) with plenty of familiar names among the credits (Everett filmmaker Bob Fink co-wrote and led archival research, Seattle filmmaker and The Stranger associate editor Charles Mudede is another co-writer). Together they allow her story to be told almost entirely through her own voice in evocatively staged interviews around San Francisco. With Devor occasionally chiming in as a stand-in for the voice of her FBI handler, she unspools her personal history and observations. Many scenes are filmed with her in the back seat of a station wagon to approximate her covert debriefs; others find her sitting in the sunroom of a mid-century home overlooking the city at night, or returning to jewel-box chapel inside the hotel where she attempted to end the president’s life with a newly-purchased miscalibrated handgun.
At turns effusive and evasive, the nonagenarian remains a sharp an effective storyteller. A well-connected patron of the arts who was drawn to social causes in the wake of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, Moore would have been a fascinating subject regardless of one misplaced gunshot. Four-times divorced, with a mysteriously shrouded life story spanning a West Virginia childhood, young adult military service, and a Hollywood husband uninterested in raising his child, she recounts her turn from wealthy suburban housewife to an FBI informant enmeshed in the Bay Area’s burgeoning progressive movements in the early 1970s.
Alongside her stories, an etherial Vangelis-inspired soundtrack by Paul Moore underscores moody drone shots of a cityscape as shrouded in mist as her motives. Archival news footage accompanies clips from contemporary documentaries from the likes of Sandra Hochman, Agnès Varda and Ira Eisenberg to set the scene of a city and nation waking up to gay liberation, women’s liberation, and the advocacy of Vietnam veterans against the war. Numbered vignettes count up and down, piercing the multi-layered onion of the personal and political. Although we may leave the movie with more questions than answers, it’s a mesmerizing immersion that nevertheless captivates and communicates while letting its subject spin a yarn.
An earlier version of this review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival. Suburban Fury returns to Seattle for a theatrical run beginning this weekend at SIFF’s Film Center