Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Written and directed by Alex Gibney
Magnolia Pictures
2005
Rating:


At the height of its decade-long heyday, Enron ran advertisements with the tag line, "Ask why." When an investor posed the question of why Enron didn't post its earnings and was met with disdain from company CEO Jeffrey Skillings, an in-house joke changed the slogan to, "Ask why, asshole."

"Fortune" journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind and filmmaker Alex Gibney continue to ask why with the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," an in-depth investigation into the amoral business practices that led to the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Taking the Errol Morris approach to documentary filmmaking — a method that puts a premium on journalistic integrity rather than muckraking, well-framed shots rather than a Power Point presentation of talking heads — Gibney tracks the rise and fall of a company that once valued innovative ways to invigorate the energy business, then became known for its innovative bookkeeping.

Working from the book written by McLean and Elkind and filled out with archival footage, Gibney gives Enron CEOs Kenneth Lay and Skilling enough rope to hang themselves. Skilling is seen in a company skit lampooning his mark-to-market idea of claiming hypothetical profits, a practice that eventually ran Enron into the ground. Skilling and Lay also encourage their employees to invest in Enron stock, while at the same time they're selling their own and making millions in profits.

The reason that "Enron" ranks above the similar film "The Corporation," another stellar documentary about greed run amok, is that it chooses to see the Enron collapse in terms of a human Greek tragedy. Hubris and unchecked avarice led Lay and Skilling to defraud America during the get-rich-quick market boom of the late 1990s. Most dishearteningly, there was more than enough blame to go around, and most of the culprits will go unpunished (though Martha Stewart has already been convicted of and served time for her relatively lesser insider trading, Lay and Skilling won't stand trial until 2006). It appears that, today, corruption and deception are simply the cost of doing business.

Posted Thursday, April 28, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/enron.smartest.guys.in.the.room