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Peter Coyote,
Peter Coyote
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Alex Gibney,
Alex Gibney
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: Magnolia Home Entertainment
: Documentary, Political & Social Issues
: 110 min.
: English
: Spanish
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Alex Gibney, who wrote and produced Eugene Jarecki's The Trials of Henry Kissinger, examines the rise and fall of an infamous corporate juggernaut in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which he wrote and directed. The film, based on the book by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, opens with a reenactment of the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter, then travels back in time, describing Enron chairman Kenneth Lay's humble beginnings as the son of a preacher, his ascent in the corporate world as an "apostle of deregulation," his fortuitous friendship with the Bush family, and the development of his business strategies in natural gas futures. The film points out that the culture of financial malfeasance at Enron was evident as far back as 1987, when Lay apparently encouraged the outrageous risk taking and profit skimming of two oil traders in Enron's Valhalla office because they were bringing a lot of money into the company. But it wasn't until eventual CEO Jeff Skilling arrived at Enron that the company's "aggressive accounting" philosophy truly took hold. The Smartest Guys in the Room explores the lengths to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable. Their win-at-all-costs strategy included suborning financial analysts with huge contracts for their firms, hiding debts by essentially having the company loan money to itself, and using California's deregulation of the electricity market to manipulate the state's energy supply. Gibney's film reveals how Lay, Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and their retirement funds. The filmmaker posits the Enron scandal not as an anomaly, but as a natural outgrowth of free-market capitalism. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
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| It's not often you can say "Hey, that documentary had a great soundtrack!"
by Neutron
March 21, 2006 - 12:16 PM PST
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1 out of 1 members found this review helpful
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However, you can say that with Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room, excellent soundtrack choices of Tom Waits and other well chosen bits of music only add to a finely crafted film that documents the rise, and subsequent fall of Skilling, Lay and Enron.
The entire thing plays out like a classic business movie such as Wall Street or something, yet you have to remind yourself again and again, that the characters are real!
This is one of the finest documentaries i've seen in awhile... and I see a lot of them. Well worth a watch, but beware, it is likely to make you even angrier then you already are at these people as they commit egregious act after act. |
| "E" is for...
by talltale
January 21, 2006 - 5:06 PM PST
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8 out of 8 members found this review helpful
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Sleaze masquerading as businessmen (and women), the lead characters in ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM represent the corrupt, heartless and finally stupid nature of the current Bush administration to a fare-thee-well. The movie's as cleverly put together as you've heard: smart, easy to follow, if occasionally a bit obvious. Someone mentions Enron's practices being similar to a magic, rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick and--voila--the filmmakers show us a magician's hat and then a rabbit. "It was like a casino" someone else says; sure enough, we immediately see a gaming table on screen. And so forth. The film even begins with a reconstructed suicide, like some second-rate, would-be "reality" TV show.
Finally, however, none of this detracts from the heart of this documentary: how an utter lack of moral character--of Enron itself, and of the banks and investment houses, the groveling media, the accounting and law firms, and even (perhaps especially) the SEC--created the worst and largest single-company business disaster in American history. Three years later, looking around at how our country is being run, it appears that little has changed. (There's an especially informative addition to the California/Gov. Gray Davis utilities scandal in the "Deleted Scenes" section of the DVD.) What's the prognosis here? Good night and good luck. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.50)
121 Votes
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