“You carry a lot of weight around, don’t you?” In Guy Nattiv’s observant, harrowing and unmistakably feminine “The Liberation,” this line marks the first time someone truly sees through fortysomething protagonist Rita Cooper. Based on Nattiv’s own grandmother (alongside various cult survivors) and played by Carrie Coon with extraordinary emotional presence and pent-up energy privately looking for an outlet, Rita is an early-1980s woman leading an ordinary life in New Jersey. Quietly depressed, a wife to Reuben (Tracy Letts, Coon’s real-life partner) and mother to Ella (Bella Ramsey) and Jo (Odessa Young), Rita holds a monotonous desk job at a bank by day, and tends to her family by night as part of her humdrum routine. Elsewhere, she agrees to be a part of a video project as a Holocaust survivor, an identity that has defined her past and continues to seep into her present in private, guilt-ridden ways.
She is confronted with that question at her workplace by the mysterious Ricki (Lily James), an intriguing young woman with an uneasy edge looking to deposit a surprisingly hefty sum of money. Rita shrugs it off with a throwaway remark about her middle-aged metabolism, while handling Ricki’s business. But Ricki isn’t talking about the weight women routinely pressure ourselves about. She’s played with a darkly enigmatic, unnerving quality by James in her finest work to date — a knowing, even domineering smile often curling around her lips. Her next question: “When was the last time you saw the sunset on a beach?”
