This article appeared in the November 27, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Suburban Fury (Robinson Devor, 2024)

Robinson Devor’s filmmaking has always defied easy definition. His low-budget features—including The Woman Chaser (1999), Police Beat (2005), Zoo (2007), and Pow Wow (2016)—are all wide-ranging in theme and free of genre constraints, emerging from Devor’s genuine curiosity and empathy for his spiky, difficult subjects. Many of the films involve collaborations with other artists, including leftist intellectual Charles Mudede, whose work inspired the Sundance darling Police Beat, a docufiction about a lovesick Senegalese cop in Seattle; and who co-wrote Zoo, a haunting film about bestiality.

Devor’s latest, Suburban Fury—co-written with Mudede, Bob Fink, and Jason Reid—focuses on Sara Jane Moore, known for her failed attempt to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford in 1975. The documentary unfolds as a series of interviews with Moore, recorded across the Bay Area in 2009 and 2010, at locations tied to her life before and after the assassination attempt—the mid-century house with glass walls where she once lived, a vintage station wagon docked in the isolated parks where she used to meet with her FBI handler, and the hotel ballroom where she was detained after the attempt. Speaking directly to the camera, Moore offers a jagged yet compelling account of her life as an FBI informant, mother, aspiring actress, socialite, and activist, leading up to the moment when she pointed a gun at the president and pulled the trigger.

These interviews are interwoven with archival footage from the 1970s, and voiceovers recorded by Devor himself as “Bert Worthington,” Moore’s FBI handler. Based entirely on Moore’s memories of their conversations, they supply the single-source documentary with additional commentary. Through Devor’s distinctive approach—a fragmented narrative divided into numbered chapters—Sara Jane emerges as a dizzyingly multifaceted figure, a collage of complex and contradictory selves. The film is also a rich portrait of an era of American history with distinct similarities to today—a time of intense anger at the government, paranoia about surveillance, distrust between the classes, and impassioned protest movements.

After the film’s world premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival, I spoke with Devor on the phone about the making of Suburban Fury.

The film vividly portrays the doublethink and compartmentalization that are central to spy narratives, while also drawing a parallel to the cognitive dissonance of life in 2024. Could you talk about balancing Sara Jane Moore’s many contradictions through your editing and writing?

In regard to cognitive dissonance—I think that is a good way to look at the whole film. Sara Jane Moore, one could argue, gradually tried to resolve that cognitive dissonance; she became more aware and more compassionate and more active in seeing how the world was. The problem was, she was an informant for the FBI, and continued to be all the way through to the very end. So it looks like a great story in that sense, but the authenticity of her beliefs and her passion is, to this day, suspect to me.

At the end of the movie, there’s a title card that says, “In collaboration with the Secret Service.” 

Well, she remains on a watch list, so the whole project had to be communicated to the Secret Service, and all the travel had to be coordinated with them. Everything we planned to do, she had to inform them about. She even expressed some concern that she might say things in this movie that she hadn’t shared with the Secret Service or the feds since her release.

Something else I found striking about the film was its mirrored chapter structure—counting up from one to 10 and then counting down back to one. How did that approach emerge?

I was the main editor on that—I worked with Adam Sekuler, our supervising editor, who taught me quite a bit. I would say it came out of necessity. A certain hypnotic quality that I liked emerged—a conditioning element. And, practically, with Sara Jane Moore talking, she’s a strong, at times strident voice, so you can’t just run her for 90 minutes straight, like in Portrait of Jason (1967). It didn’t work. So we wanted to break up her testimony on camera. There were also holes in her story, and some things are contradictory, so we used this fragmentation to allow for chapter breaks. There needed to be moments of digestion, recalibration. The red chapter numbers were also initially supposed to feel like a Kurt Vonnegut paperback from the ’70s.

You’ve collaborated with DP Sean Kirby for many years. How would you describe your collaborative process? And how did you decide on an approach for this film and topic?

Sean is a brilliant cinematographer. For this, we wanted to do two things. First, we knew we wanted to use a couple of monster zoom lenses—a hallmark of the ’70s. And the second thing: I was really happy with what we did in our previous film, Pow Wow, where we used what we called “environmental interviews.” We’d put people very far from the camera to capture their environment fully—in that case, the desert. I loved that wide-angle look.

With Suburban Fury, if the bulk of the material was going to be talking, we wondered: how could we make a talking head more interesting? That’s when we decided on the station wagon, moving it around San Francisco and placing it in locations where she’d meet the FBI. The car looked striking against the city’s topography, and putting her in the back seat had this echo of her being a mom, driving kids around. Sean was excited to take risks, like having her stand behind glass, speaking through it in that house. You don’t see that often. I give Sara Jane a lot of credit for embracing my direction and rolling with it.

Rewatching Police Beat, I was struck by the scene in which a character passionately argues that someone should assassinate President Bush. In Suburban Fury, Sara Jane Moore comes across as a totally unique, bizarre character, unlike anyone else, but at the same time—maybe this ties back to the title—she represents a kind of everyman in her anger and frustration. The movie makes you think that there are probably a lot of people like her. 

Well, I would say that an exceptional person probably acts more than they speak. And Sara Jane Moore acts. What is a great protagonist? Someone who is in action, someone who is in movement. She was in movement her whole life. As far as assassinating the president—the culture of violence on both the right and the left around her was pronounced. She’s right there next to people who are killing and ready to kill. I’m not around that myself; I’m not sure how many people are today. Sara Jane Moore did say that people were sitting around saying, “Let’s do this,” and she grew tired of them just posturing. You know, I’m a nonviolent person; I don’t subscribe to anything along those lines. I think it’s boring and abhorrent and destructive and any number of other things.

What made you decide to be the voice of the FBI agent? How did that feel?

(Laughs) I did that for practical concerns. I was sitting in the edit suite, and I said, “You know what? She’s talking about these conversations that she had with Bert—could we turn that into a voiceover?” I didn’t even have a proper microphone in my edit suite, but I just recorded it and started building this catalog. Then we realized there needed to be this rhythm, a kind of dance or a pas de deux between the two for the whole movie. Since “Bert” was a cover identity, it didn’t feel right to have an actor portray him. As Adam pointed out, once I played the role, it became almost like a proxy for what a control agent does with an informant. I liked that. We rerecorded the track, but the new mic made my voice sound higher and cleaner. When I was broke and suffering, my voice sounded a lot “better,” so we kept the original.

I’m not going to say that I’m any different than a control agent, in the sense that I know what I want. I’m also trying to get something from Sara Jane Moore. The difference is, I’m going to work hard to give her an authentic voice and try to be empathetic with her. It’s worth mentioning that there’s never been testimony like this from a potential presidential assassin. There’s never been a film that explores an assassin with this level of access and depth. I’m really pleased we were able to construct it this way, capturing the story of someone alive and skilled enough as a storyteller to give a compelling view of both sides.

Lucia Ahrensdorf is a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in Foreign Policy, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Screen Slate, and The Film Stage.