ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
**** out of *****

Genres
Business
Documentary
Politics

2005
Directed by
Alex Gibney
Written by
Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (book The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron)
Alex Gibney

It's amazing how life imitates art. Recently I reviewed the Akira Kurosawa film The Bad Sleep Well, a film that deals with high level corporate corruption; it is about an executive who was forced to take his life to protect thoe higher up in management in an effort to keep their dirty dealings secret. However, for as long as humans have had a fundamental 'want' greed has existed. And it's greed that propelled Enron onto the track that led to a tragic fate for the 30,000 employees and for the millions of people that Enron stepped on in California in order to get themselves out of a hole made larger everyday by the fabrication of profits that never existed.

As Enron's stock price rose, so did  Jeff Skilling's pants.

This is a tale of greed, a tale of corruption, and a tale of tragic figures caught in self-serving game that led to the fall of one of America's largest corporations. In Oliver Stone's Wall Street Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) delivers what became the tagline for Corporate America in the 1980s: "Greed is good". Well, the actual quote is "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms - greed for life, for money, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind". Replace the word "mankind" with "Enron" and you've pretty much summed up what this documentary is ultimately about.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is based on the book of the same name by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind that exposes the scandal in its entirety. The building blocks that were set-up to increase Enron’s stock price, the key figures responsible, the steps taken, the company's rise and its fall. Filmmaker Alex Gibney has done a fine job in taking this complex story and unraveling the layers to give audiences a clear understanding of what actually developed. It's interesting to come into this not knowing a lot (obviously I was aware of the scandal when it hit the news) but I was not aware of the reasons the company collapsed and any of the people that were directly involved in it.

If you really want to know what  director Alex Gibney looks like...

The documentary works well in establishing the key elements that led to the company's demise as well as taking a closer look at the personalities of the executives. The film incorporates expert analysis from the Fortune magazine reporters that wrote the book, former employees, recorded conversations, corporate videos, and archival footage from the Congressional hearings to piece together the events. What you'll see will shock you, this high level of greed is truly astonishing and the cocky living-on-the-edge attitudes of Enron's management was reflected in the way the company did business and how the employees acted. It's not hard to see how easily morals and ethics can be forgotten in an environment such as that.

Kenneth Lay or The Great Gazoo?

There have also been comments that I've read online about this film's ultimate agenda being a "Democratic propaganda tool" as it sheds negative light on the current Bush presidency and their connection with Enron's CEO Kenneth Lay. It is interesting that Gibney does ignore Enron's past and the dealings they had in the time of Clinton's presidency, however I certainly don't think this is a propaganda tool. The parts of the film that focus on the Bush presidency and Enron are only briefly touched on, if this were indeed a piece of propaganda then a mention of Bush's involvement would have been made at any opportunity, but it wasn't.

This film details the who, what, where when, and how; all the right questions to ask and all of which are answered in this well made and interesting documentary.

Finger_Of_DOOM's reviews also appear on DVD Compare, where they include details of the DVD release. For this review click here.

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