Three stars out of four.Don't Know What You Want? Check the FAQ. "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a Magnolia Pictures release, is not rated but contains language and nudity. Which ultimately leaves us asking: Were these people just greedy, and they got in over their heads? Were they truly, deeply evil? Or were they, as the title suggests, simply too smart for their own good? It's an impossible question to answer, and Gibney is wise not to try, but he does paint a vivid, tragic, startling portrait of how the best and brightest of American corporate culture can go horribly wrong.
(Same with Lay.) Supposedly Skilling wanted to talk _ and is a heck of a talker _ but his lawyers wouldn't allow it. One complaint, though: It would have been nice if Gibney had said on camera, as he does in the film's production notes, that he tried repeatedly to get Skilling to comment and was turned down. He also refrains from inserting himself in the action actor Peter Coyote serves as narrator. "Son of a Preacher Man" by Dusty Springfield heralds the start of a segment about Lay's Baptist upbringing.īut Gibney's film thankfully lacks the stench of personal vendetta that too often marks Moore's work. Phantom Planet's "California," the theme from the glossy nighttime soap "The O.C." plays during a section about the state's rolling blackouts. Simultaneously eye-opening and entertaining, "The Smartest Guys in the Room" recalls the best aspects of Michael Moore's movies, complete with an accompanying soundtrack of appropriate songs to punctuate every misdeed and misadventure. Gibney tells all their stories through a lively mix of news footage, re-enactments, corporate video, interviews with employees and insider audio recordings. One electrical lineman had $348,000 in his 401(k) and company stock, and ended up cashing out with just $1,200.
Both have pleaded innocent.)Īt the heart of the film, though, are the everyday employees and investors who trusted the Houston-based energy company with their financial security and were left in ruin, while many Enron honchos walked away with millions.
#Enron the smartest guys in the room documentary trial
(He and Skilling are set to go on trial next year for fraud and conspiracy charges. Ken Lay, the leader of them all, comes off as completely disingenuous when he suggests he couldn't possibly have known every little detail about the company he founded, the motto of which ironically was, "Ask Why." Either that or he's in denial. "You gotta love the West," says another.) "Burn, baby, burn," one guy laughs as swaths of the state are engulfed in wildfires. (And the tape recordings of their phone conversations with each other are stunning for their brazenness. There are the trader drones who, drunk with their own misguided sense of power, toyed with California's energy supplies for profit and sport. There are pathetic figures like Lou Pai, an ex-executive with a proclivity for lap dances who left his wife for his stripper girlfriend who had his baby (though with his Enron fortune, he also became one of the biggest landowners in Colorado). Gibney gives us corporate cowboys like Jeff Skilling, Enron's former CEO, who transformed himself from weakling to weekend warrior and instilled in his employees a Darwinian culture of testosterone and one-upmanship.
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