Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room - Palm Beach Post

'Enron' welcomes you to Greed Central

By HAP ERSTEIN
Palm Beach Post

Documentaries are most effective telling stories that we would never believe if they were presented as fiction.

Falling comfortably into that category is Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, about the rise and fall of the Houston-based energy corporation. With head-shaking awe, the film recounts how what was once the seventh-largest firm in the nation crashed and burned, taking its underling employees' retirement funds with it.

Magnolia Pictures

'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'

B+

The verdict: A well-written account of the rise and fall of energy giant Enron.

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

Moviegoers should appreciate this concise and accessible recap of how Enron manipulated its balance sheet, posting profits based on expectations rather than true earnings. Ruthlessly filling its own coffers with the adversity of others, the company virtually manufactured the California energy crisis, coaxing plant managers to shut down operations as the price of electricity soared.

When its bubble burst, Enron's stock came tumbling down, wiping out the retirement savings of thousands of employees, whose accounts had been frozen by the company brass, who had long since cashed out, siphoning vast amounts from the crumbling corporation.

All of this could have made an exceedingly dry, uninvolving film, but writer-director Alex Gibney keeps it entertaining without trivializing its subject. He does so largely by focusing on the personalities at the top — inspirational Pied Piper Jeff Skilling, Enron's chief executive officer, and Kenneth Lay, the company's more soft-spoken but no less venal chairman, who took over both hats after Skilling lucratively bowed out of daily operations.

Gibney stitches together lots of delicious video footage, including shots of Enron stockholder meetings at which Lay and Skilling all but tap dance, assuring the assembled audience that all is well with the company, while it is really in the process of disintegrating. Gibney is not beneath using shots of television's The Simpsons if they can illustrate his point, but he remains fairly journalistic in his approach, while making it clear how outraged he is by Enron.

Still, he stops far short of emulating Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9-11), not fabricating his case out of partial truths for the sake of sensationalism. Based on the book by Fortune magazine writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, and narrated with understated cynicism by Peter Coyote, the ironically titled Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a defining film of our times, a morality tale in which simple greed becomes a company's undoing.