Financial Fantasyland
'Enron' documentary exposes corporate skullduggery

Just in case you're not furious enough about the cult of cronyism and deceit rampant in corporate America, don't miss Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Alex Gibney's sleek, lucidly argued documentary on the meteoric rise and mighty crash of the corporate giant.

Riding to prominence on the coattails of the Bush family in the early '90s, Fortune 500 darling Enron proved to be the Seinfeld of business: a company about nothing. Begun as a provider of natural gas pipelines, the company in its heyday had no actual goods or services to trade (and no profits either, although that secret was jealously guarded by company executives and "aggressive" accountants, with the aid of financial analysts all too eager to be blinded by the supernova of apparent success). Instead of product, Enron trafficked in ideas and greed.

Based on the book The Smartest Guys In The Room by Fortune Magazine investigative reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, Gibney's film shows how skillfully Enron's sleight-of-hand artists manipulated the marketplace to post quarterly numbers based on projected—not actual—profits, a "financial Fantasyland" tirelessly promoted by massive PR campaigns to sucker in more investors and banks eager to ride the gravy train, float the pyramid scam and line the pockets of Enron executives at the top.

The movie hits home in detailing the skullduggery by which the energy "crisis" in deregulated California was manufactured (via carefully orchestrated blackouts and fear propaganda) to inflate energy prices and oust governor Gray Davis in favor of pro-business Arnold "No special interests" Schwarzenegger. The now-infamous audio tapes of gleeful Enron traders chortling over the California grannies they're fleecing are presented in counterpoint to the plight of a working-class lineman with Enron partner Portland General Electric who represents the hundreds of thousands of laborers whose life savings in pensions and 401K plans were absorbed by the corporate shark, leaving them with nothing. Meanwhile Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay and their minions made off with multiple millions each.

It's tough for us to feel the weight of Greek tragedy Gibney hopes to impart for these grinning ghouls, who were either maliciously amoral or staggeringly ignorant. (Which is more likely? Especially when Gibney points out that master showman Skilling has put a lawyer on retainer for a cool $23 million to defend him in his upcoming trial in January, 2006.) But in all other respects, Gibney creates an accessible film, whose wealth of information is juiced up with plenty of filmmaking chutzpah. (In one inspired sequence about traders who rape and pillage California's energy market with the flick of a switch, Gibney cuts in vintage footage from a '50s behavioral study in which participants agreed to the unconscionable —in this case, administer what they were told were near-fatal electroshocks to other participants—as long as someone else in apparent authority gave them permission and promised to take responsibility.) Gibney also makes inspired use of popular songs chosen for maximum irony.

ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM A film by Alex Gibney. Not rated. 109 minutes. (***1/2)
Review published in Good Times, May 12, 2005