Files on failed presidential assassins

Seventeen days after Charles Manson cultist Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm tried to kill President Gerald Ford, Sarah Jane Moore, an ordinary suburban mother, tried to do the same Same thing. After waiting outside the downtown San Francisco hotel where Ford was staying, she opened fire amid a crowd of eager onlookers. Like Fromm before her, Moore did not succeed, and her story went down in history—seemingly destined to become one of those facts that sounds too strange to be true.

Now, nearly 50 years later, filmmaker Robinson Devor (police beating, zoo, POW wow) returns to Moore’s story. His new documentary is fascinating; suburban rage“Erie,” which premiered at the New York Film Festival, attempts to construct a consistent portrait of Eli. Moore was released in 2007 after serving more than three decades in prison. Potential assassin.

A note on the title card tells viewers that Moore did not ask anyone else to be interviewed for the project, nor did anyone come to tell her story or discuss it with anyone else in her life. The film functions primarily as personal testimony—a fascinating, if often too in-depth, autobiography of a man whose political transformation was plagued by narrative inconsistencies.

This isn’t the first project to demonstrate Moore’s unreliability as a storyteller. In 2008, journalist Geri Spieler published Targeting the President: The remarkable story of the woman who shot Gerald Fordbased on their 30 years of conversations. In the introduction, Spiller describes Moore’s cunning behavior after the book project began: “As I began to draw up the schedule and create the roster, Sarah Jane began canceling our visits,” Spiller writes. “She didn’t like that I was researching the book without her direct and detailed involvement.” Moore, who was still incarcerated at the time, became nervous, agitated, and emotionally unstable. Their conversation, which had been amiable and enthusiastic, now grew colder. Eventually, Moore stopped speaking to Spiller, who continued writing the book without her.

Moore’s caution about the facts was immediately apparent in her conversation with Devore. suburban rage. The interviews shift rapidly between matter-of-fact (and sometimes eloquent) recollections and a brutal insistence on details and their order. Working with his former collaborator and photographer Sean Kirby, DeVore shot in locations that echoed Moore’s life in the days before and after the incident, such as the station wagon (where she would meet the federal investigation Bureau (FBI) boss’s place) or the hotel banquet room where she works.

Francis Ford Coppola recalled DeVore’s use of long takes in which Moore sat in her car on a street she knew well dialogue (That was the inspiration here). In these haunting scenes, we, the audience, seem uniquely positioned to be the intruders, spying on Moore, just as she was once assigned to do.

Before Moore attempted to kill President Ford, she was an FBI informant assigned by an agent calling himself Burt Worthington to infiltrate left-wing political organizing groups and report their activities to the government. After Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, she was inspired to become more politically active. This multiracial revolutionary group demanded ransom in the form of a food distribution program, and Randolph Hearst responded by launching the “Needy” program. Moore volunteered to keep the books for the organization, and it was while working for the organization that she was recruited by the intelligence agency.

Devore organizes his documentary into a series of vignettes, mostly soundtracked by Moore’s recollections. Numbers are used to represent each section, first in ascending order and then in descending order, like a countdown clock. We know that the explosive ending featured Moore aiming a pistol at Ford. Arranging the material in this way gives the film the tension of a thriller, and also makes Moore’s narrative feel like a deft combination of facts.

If it feels hard to keep up, that seems to be part of the point. While Moore knows how to tell a gripping story, telling anecdotes vividly with vivid images, the threads don’t always flow together. She eschews biographies, so though suburban rage Covering parts of her early life – her desire to be an actress, her apparently fraught relationship with her mother – it doesn’t satisfy the thirst for more detail.

Moore’s story becomes most shaky when she explains her transformation from FBI informant to activist. As she attended rallies, protests, and meetings with members of the Sudan Liberation Army and other left-leaning movement groups, Moore became more aware of America’s systemic problems and aligned with the values ​​of these groups. However, in her own words, she continually reported their activities to the FBI. Moore would sit down at the typewriter every day and write a report for her boss.

When asked about this inconsistency, Moore became nervous, almost hostile. Her energy echoes that of Bill O’Neal in the archival footage shown at the end of Shaka King’s Fred Hampton biopic Judas and the Black Messiah. In this brief clip, O’Neill talks about how despite helping the government undermine the Black Panther Party, he still believed in the movement and, unlike armchair activists, tried to make a difference. Likewise, Moore cleared up the inconsistency during her hearing for her life sentence. “Do I regret that I tried?” she said of the attempted assassination. “Yes and no. Yes, because it accomplished almost nothing except ruining the rest of my life. And, no, I don’t regret trying because it seemed like the right expression of my anger at the time.

Isn’t there much to be angry about? Viewers are left to draw their own conclusions about Moore’s wrath, but DeVore and his archival researcher Bob Fink (who also co-wrote Charles Mulder) provide a lot of background historical footage. Television excerpts, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera from the early to mid-1970s reveal the country’s simultaneous disasters and social inequalities, with Watergate, Vietnam, racial injustice, and violence against the poor all leading to a high level of public distrust of government. . Ford’s plan is to restore that confidence and take on the mission of past and present presidents to reunite a long-divided country.

During this period, Moore became increasingly disillusioned with the system and expressed a desire to show that the United States was not living up to its professed ideals. The most interesting thing is, suburban rage This tension is explored alongside Moore’s narrative. It is in this space that DeVore’s film, imbued with the energy of the archives and the excitement of a less-than-trustworthy narrator, finds its purpose.