Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Austin American-Statesman

'Enron' sorts through the dirty laundry

By JOHN DeFORE
Austin American-Statesman

An effective summing-up of years of headlines, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" gets the facts across while affording an intimate perspective on the scandal's key figures. There's little new to report here — regular newspaper readers will know most of what the movie tells them — but viewers who stopped reading Enron stories in disgust long ago may find they have only partly understood the company's sins.

Magnolia Pictures

'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'

3 out of 5 stars

Director: Alex Gibney
Writing credits: Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind
Run time: 110 minutes
Release date: April 22, 2005
Rating: Unrated.

On the web
Official movie site

The film is especially good at explaining how Enron's search for unrealistic profits was a direct cause of California's misery-inducing energy crisis. In one of the documentary's most gripping moments, we hear taped phone conversations between the company's traders; informed that life- and property-threatening wildfires are lowering the capacity of power lines, therefore increasing the price of energy, one man utters three heartless words: "Burn, baby, burn."

"Enron" paints lively portraits of the braggarts, charlatans and bullies who built the firm; just as importantly, it shows how the nature of corporate life allowed their amorality to fester, encouraging fraud at other companies thought to be above reproach.

Jammed to the gills with songs that must have cost a fortune to license, "Enron" the movie flirts with the ostentatiousness the firm's executives were condemned for. (Worse, the song choices are too on-the-nose in their correlation to what's being said onscreen.) But it's hard to complain about a documentary that doesn't feel like a made-for-TV expose, especially when it's able to make complicated accounting fraud accessible — engrossing, even — to laypeople.