'Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room' - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

'The Smartest Guys In the Room' may be the scariest movie of the year

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Ask why" was the slogan of the Houston-based energy company Enron, the seventh largest corporation in the United States until its spectacular meltdown in 2001.

Accordingly, filmmaker Alex Gibney does ask why. What he learns is the subject of his brilliant and brilliantly entertaining documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room." His conclusion is that a bunch of greedy, arrogant Enron executives asked themselves, "Why not?" and not only plundered their company, but also the future of 20,000 employees who saw their life savings evaporate even as top brass like Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling were pocketing millions.

Magnolia Pictures

'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'

A-

The verdict: In this impressively researched and hugely entertaining documentary, the smartest guys are also the ickiest guys.

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

Part Greek tragedy, part black comedy, "Enron" isn't a cheeky essay along the lines of a Michael Moore. However, there is an unmistakable hint of cynicism in Peter Coyote's understated narration.

Still, far more damning than anything Coyote says is the on-the-record material itself: C-SPAN and CNBC archives, interviews in print and on television, cooked books, audio tapes, even in-house videos in which high-profile execs, including Lay, act like overgrown frat boys at a pep rally while urging their employees to buy more stock, even as they were selling theirs as fast as they could.

If it weren't so awful, it would be hilarious.

The hubris of these men is astounding. Here are the Enron party-line party boys nonchalantly initiating rolling blackouts in California and smirking about "poor Grandma Millie" whose rates are about to double. Here is Skilling proposing a creative market approach in which expected future profits are figured in the books as actual profits. Here is one Enron exec proposing they sell the weather. The unscrupulous salesmen in "Glengarry Glen Ross" are Girl Scouts by comparison. And they're fictional.

Gibney's research is impressive, as is his ability to clarify a complex bit of shady business into something (semi) comprehensible to those who don't know a day trader from a daytripper.

It's about the people, not the numbers, someone tells Gibney, and he takes that advice to heart. He talks to second-rung Enron execs who weren't in on the scam, to courageous whistle-blowers, to investigative journalists such as Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, whose best-selling book, "Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron," provided the basis for the movie.

One of the film's few flaws is that not only does Gibney fail to interview Lay and Skilling, he neglects to explain why. Only a reviewer with access to the movie's press notes would learn that both men declined to talk.

In one clip, former President Ronald Reagan is seen talking about "the magic of the free market" while, on the soundtrack, we hear "That Old Black Magic." Somehow, for those Enron "smart" guys, that statement translated into voodoo economics. As one interviewee says, "No one who was supposed to say no said no."

Which probably says more about the state of business ethics in this country than we may want to contemplate. And the madness continues. Lay and Skilling are supposed to go on trial sometime early next year. And one of Lay's lawyers insists, "No one has been hurt more by the Enron catastrophe than Ken Lay."

Forget "The Amityville Horror" and "The Ring Two." Here's the scariest movie of the year so far.