“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is everything a documentary is supposed to be.
A controlled sense of outrage backed by impeccable reporting. Succinct explanations of a complex scandal that never lose sight of the human touch that made them possible. Smooth production that frames the topic with proper import and makes it impossible to ignore. Follow-ups on who lied to us four years ago and why it is still relevant.
Go see it before you buy another stock you don’t understand. Go see it before you bank your retirement on the company pension fund. Go see it before you vote in another election.
If nothing else, go see it to watch a great story told well. Director Alex Gibney was smart enough to follow the outlines of the definitive book on Enron by reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Gibney realizes the virtue in repackaging a true tale – with very little embellishment – in a new art form.
One of the movie’s many virtues is capturing the swashbuckling hubris of everything Enron. The superhero-style business magazine covers alone are laugh-out-loud funny, in retrospect. The company was inventing “a new business model,” though nobody could explain it beyond the fact it involved trading … something. Houston became the company town. Employee assemblies were like revival meetings, with the stock price as liturgy. Chairman Ken Lay was President George W. Bush’s “Kenny Boy.”
Just before its collapse, Enron was the seventh most valuable company in America, with sights on being the largest corporation in the world. All from trading … something. Gas? Electricity, maybe? Never mind, what’s that stock price again?
Turns out the new business model invented by Enron was printing counterfeit money, in the form of stock. After that, it was pure, old-fashioned salesmanship: Persuade people to buy the stock, and it goes up, which helps persuade more people to buy the stock, and it goes up again. Pretty soon, you can dupe the most astute financial minds around the globe into helping you fool everyone else, because, son of a gun, that stock just keeps going up.
“Enron” deftly skewers the full-frontal fraudulence of the company’s biggest names, including Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, set to go to trial early next year. The movie makes clear they either lied to everyone or contradicted their own images as captains of finance through monumental ignorance – both offenses worthy of jail time and felony derision.
But Gibney and the writers’ better service to the world is returning a spotlight to all the damage Enron caused the nation and its little people. They weave in recordings of Enron’s rogue traders as they fleece California during the energy crisis, and lay appropriate blame on federal regulators who shrugged off the whining of Left Coast loonies.
They give voice to low-level employees who put all their retirement funds in Enron stock, at Skilling’s urging, and lost all. Within a few minutes, they deflate the limitless self-regard of bankers and analysts from Merrill Lynch to J.P. Morgan, who at best gambled their Ph.Ds on magic money.
As you leave the theater, try not to dismiss the vague sense of depression as just some distant dust storm from Texas. Similar corporate manipulations and abysmal decision making have left your friends and neighbors hanging at Qwest, United, Adelphia and other once-proud institutions.
The authors put it best in the chapter title for the epilogue of their book: Isn’t anybody sorry?
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
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“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”
Not rated but includes profanity, nude scene with strippers|1 hour, 50 minutes|DOCUMENTARY|Directed by Alex Gibney, from the book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind; key appearances from the authors, Jeffrey Skilling, Ken Lay, Andrew Fastow, etc.|Opens today at the Mayan Theatre.
