So I re-watched the movie last night, and I’ve been thinking about those credit scenes, in which you see glimpses of their confidential files, and in which the rawest, ugliest bits of their characters are laid out (and this is related to why I think Gaby Teller is poorly written, because she is without essential flaws, but that will be a subsequent rant about misogynistic writing in general.) Anyway, Napoleon is a gambler, and addict, a con man, a thief. In other words: a liar. Illya’s chief flaw, of course, is what his file calls “violent personality disorder.” In other words: a psychopath. I’ve talked before about how interaction with Napoleon leads to his first psychotic episode that a) occurs because he does NOT want to commit violence, and b) ends in something other than violence. (We’ll come back to that last point.)
At issue here is how each man helps the other begin to resolve their chief character flaw — or at least, begin to grapple with it. Because Napoleon is a liar, and every iteration of him as a person — art thief, spy, man of the world — is just him being a liar, because that’s what lying liars do. They create a persona and then inhabit it, and Napoleon’s persona is the sophisticated confidence man who “prefers to work alone” and needs nothing and no one, whose sense of personal integrity is elastic at best, and who certainly feels no loyalty to anyone, anything, or any idea other than himself. He is not a nice man. He is not a particularly good man. It is not a particularly good man who ditches Illya in that boat and swims to shore, then sits there — in one of the film’s most hilarious sequences — calmly eating a sandwich and some warm chianti while Illya literally goes down in flames in the background. He even starts to drive off, because of all the victims of his lies, there is none greater than Napoleon himself. He has lied to himself about who he is, because the lie to oneself is the chief and greatest con of all, and he’s mastered it. He is Napoleon Solo, and he doesn’t care about anyone, because that will just weigh you down, and he won’t tolerate so much as a speck of lint on his jacket. So he starts to drive off, leaving Illya to certain death.
Only he can’t, quite.
You can see the moment when it happens: Is this who I am? Of course it is, what you are talking about, just drive! But… it’s not who I am, is it? You can see the moment when he accepts that he has been lying to himself; he is not the person who can drive away, dammit. He wishes he were. But he’s not, and he accepts that, and he drives back, launching himself into the water, because when Napoleon decides to do a thing, it will not be done by halves.
Illya helps him stop lying.
From that point on in the film, there is a realness to Napoleon that Cavill plays beautifully. He has been stripped of the ability to lie to himself, and while he still lies to others with perfect ease — he wouldn’t be much of a spy if he couldn’t — he can no longer lie to himself. He is a person with loyalties, and he does care what happens to other people, in particular this strange and provoking man who has made him start to question every assumption about himself and the world he has made.
And what of Illya?
He does not lie to himself, and never has. He is a person of extraordinary honesty and directness — Napoleon’s true foil. But he has other problems, a lot of them. And for the first time, like I said above, he experiences a psychotic episode because he DOESN’T want to kill, and not because he longs to. But even more importantly: for the first time he has a psychotic episode that does not end in someone getting hurt. Napoleon just quietly ripped the lid off the box he has been trapped in, and he did it by tossing him his father’s watch, by reminding him that a world of actual loyalties, of true integrity, of real connection, lies behind the shadow world of politics and espionage that is their day job. That moment of connection is his way out of his prison of psychosis, like the moment of rescuing Illya was Napoleon’s way out of his prison of lies. And even more beautifully, one moment is the direct cause of the other. When Napoleon stops lying to himself, and allows himself to form connections, then he does things like retrieve Nikolai Kuryakin’s watch for no other reason than it is important to Illya. Seeing Napoleon’s connection, and his willingness to own it, defuses the psychosis in Illya. And that connection — that ability to connect, rather, that willingness to admit the capacity for connection lay within him — that was because of Illya. Illya sets the whole loop in motion.
These two deeply flawed men can only be healed by each other, and can only be whole with each other. That is just basic cinematic exposition. That is exactly what the film is saying. Now, as a fangirl and a queer-eyed reader, naturally I am going to extend that connection sexually, which is my prerogative as an imaginative viewer. I’m not saying the film itself connects them sexually. I am saying the film creates their deepest emotional bond with each other, and makes it perfectly clear that there is ONLY ONE PERSON who holds the key to unlocking each of them from their private hells. Call it a romantic connection, call it a soul bond, call it the deepest form of brotherhood, it doesn’t matter — at the end of the day, they are the piece that makes the other whole.