Much of the entertainment value comes from the undeniable pleasure of feeling morally superior to many of the people on screen, a nice antidote to the envy they might have inspired when they were riding high. Interweaving Peter Coyote's sober, ever-so-slightly sarcastic voice-over narration with interviews and video clips (as well as one ill-advised and unnecessary re-enactment) and accompanied by an anthology of well-chosen pop songs, it manages to be both informative and entertaining. Based on the best-selling book by the Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, "Enron" is a tight, fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed.
Skilling, the top Enron executives who have yet to face justice, should probably stay away, since the movie makes the case against them with prosecutorial vigor. If you are looking for a good dose of outrage at a theater near you, you won't find a better bargain than "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a new documentary directed by Alex Gibney.Īnyone who might be in the jury pool for the coming trials of Kenneth L. They look like the Stairway to Heaven in that old David Niven movie, but at the end they only led down, down, down. Two vast staircases sweep up from either side of the trading floor to the aeries of Lay and Skilling, whose palatial offices overlook the traders. Then we see the room when it was Enron's main trading floor, with countless computer monitors on the tables and hundreds of traders on the phones. We see a vast empty room, with rows of what look like abandoned lunchroom tables. Strange, that there has not been more anger over the Enron scandals.Early in the film, there's a striking image. We hear Enron traders laughing about "Grandma Millie," a hypothetical victim of the rolling blackouts, and boasting about the millions they made for Enron. Using tape recordings of Enron traders on the phone with California power plants, the film chillingly overhears them asking plant managers to "get a little creative" in shutting down plants for "repairs." Between 30 percent and 50 percent of California's energy industry was shut down by Enron a great deal of the time, and up to 76 percent at one point, as the company drove the price of electricity higher by nine times. There was never a shortage of power in California. The most shocking material in the film involves the fact that Enron cynically and knowingly created the phony California energy crisis.
It is best when it sticks to fact, shakier when it goes for visual effects and heavy irony. It is assembled out of a wealth of documentary and video footage, narrated by Peter Coyote, from testimony at congressional hearings, and from interviews with such figures as disillusioned Enron exec Mike Muckleroy and whistle-blower Sherron Watkins. The documentary is based on the best-selling book of the same title, co-written by Fortune magazine's Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. The movie argues that it was a con game almost from the start. There is a general impression that Enron was a good corporation that went bad. It tells the story of how Enron rose to become the seventh largest corporation in America with what was essentially a Ponzi scheme, and in its last days looted the retirement funds of its employees to buy a little more time.
No matter what your politics, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" will make you mad. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)