Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room - DVD Review

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The word “documentary” instantly sends me to my childhood, where anticipated time with Disney cartoons, adventures, or shaggy dog stories were replaced by (yawn) Disney wildlife films like An Hour in the Life of the Albino Cricket Snail of Missouri. Then, there was High School civic class and You Were There for what seemed an eternity with really bad actors revealing why events like the settlement of New Nederlandville were important (yawn). Today, documentary films are changing our landscape by relating topical information in a manner that’s stimulating and fascinating. Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, is just this kind of documentary.

This multidimensional study of one of the biggest business scandals in American history is directed by Alex Gibney, and at 110 minutes roles by at breathtaking speed. Enron, the Houston-based energy trading and communications company, employed about 21,000 people before it went bankrupt in 2001. Through the ingenious use of "creative" accounting, Enron came to be listed as the seventh largest company in the country and seemed poised to continue domination of a field it virtually invented: the trading of securities in energy, communications, and of all things, the weather.

The films chronological order lays out, through cunningly captured interviews, congressional hearings footage and video clips, not a company that simply lost its way and panicked, but that was crooked from the beginning. Shocking material comes from internal Enron files, like a recorded phone conversation between two of the company's electricity traders working to create the rolling blackouts of California's "energy crisis" of 2001.

"There's plenty of power available - for the right f****** price." one of them observes.
"Let'em use candles," his colleague answers.

It's like listening in to the water cooler chat of concentration camp guards. Their duties weren't going to make them rich, but all along the general idea is that this was a corporate culture planted and carefully cultivated from the top down.

Ken Lay, Enron’s CEO, passed away last year prior to entering prison. Jeffery Skilling, Enron COO, is serving 24 years, but has well-paid attorney’s working day and night to reduce the sentence. Andy Fastow, Enron CFO, received a whooping six years, with two years probation. Others, like Lou Lung Pai, Kenneth Rice and Greg Whalley turned states evidence and walked away highly embarrassed, and in Pai’s case $243 million dollars richer. By the end of the film I was wondering just how many off-shore bank accounts still hold hundreds of millions of dollars of investors money.

In the final analysis, I can’t help comparing the main characters to the villains of Star Wars. With Ken Lay as Palpatine, the evil Emperor, and Jeffery Skilling; Darth Vader. There are moments in the film where I sensed that Skilling, a brilliant salesman, was never really in control of what he started. In the last days of Enron’s collapse, Skilling was found in the streets of Houston yelling wildly at other pedestrians. He really believed that he was creating a new world order. In the end I wonder if he’ll ever admit that he was not smart, just devious?

This is a great, fast look at American commerce and values at their worst and makes me want to go out and see a another good documentary right now