KILLERS

The 88-year-old monkey man splatters clorox, straight from the bottle, over sidewalk weeds outside. Quote, “I’m crazy. I’m really crazy.” Heigl plays a recently-dumped internet-security software developer swept off her feet in Nice by boyishly buff Kelso, a CIA assassin whose violent side translates, in their courtship, into suavity and the spontaneity she lacks. He longs for exurbia and normativity, she obliges, they marry, he nicknames her breasts Wit and Charm (really), and they move to a development where he starts a contracting business—during the bubble, one hopes—to push their homestead’s border ever-further into the scrub-green rind of the unsaid.

Unsettling. Fetus as MacGuffin. And is that the new iPhoto on the Mac they hack into? Why is it so nice? I hear it recognizes faces, a paranoid’s wet dream, you sync up the backgrounds and find out who really lurks there. But if you could let your pursuers reach and destroy you, you’d set them free. Just kidding, they’d still be cursing you, saying you’ve gotten more passive-aggressive than ever.

Couples of America, do your secrets have secrets? When the rival spies finally come for Kelso, Heigl’s mad and all the dirty laundry comes out: insufficiently frequent sex, and porn. But don’t forget, David Foster Wallace says the pornophile seeks not empty degradation but rather to scrutinize performed pleasure for those moments of accidental joy that in spite of everything breech its obsidian surface, thereby dangling a paradoxical intimacy or at least a glimpse of it. Granted, it depends on your level of investment in an outside/inside trope of subjectivity. The reversal being, after it turns out everyone they know—his pal and coworkers, her best friend, a couple down the street, her dad—is a killer, the only one who’s not is the next-door neighbor with whom they dispute the property line. And it’s her whom Heigl punches climactically in the face.