I had a passing conversation recently with someone who'd flown through and spent an extra day in Houston, and was struck by the still-massive economic footprint of the Enron washout, several years down the line. I recommended Alex Gibney's moving and beautifully depressing documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and so I thought I'd post a review of the film, tweaked slightly from its original publication concurrent with the movie's theatrical release. To wit:

The numbers hit you first, though not with the direct club force of a riot baton that you might expect. Enron, the ascendancy: The seventh largest corporation in the United States. From $10 billion to $65 billion in business in under 10 years. Enron, the aftermath: 24 days to complete bankruptcy. More than 20,000 shell-shocked employees left without jobs, many given 30 minutes to clear out of the company’s Downtown Houston office building. $1.2 billion in personal savings and $2 billion in pensions wiped out, a financial tsunami. Oh, and the other numbers? A handful of executives waltzing away with hundreds of millions of cashed-out stock options while their crew all went down with the proverbial ship. There, it all starts to come together.

Written and directed by Gibney and an essential hit at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is essential viewing for every adult trying to make sense of the insanity and inanity of corporate culture, and sure to be a continued zeitgeist talking point for years, beyond the scope of punishments meted out to former (and now deceased) CEO Kenneth Lay and COO Jeff Skilling. Based on Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s book of the same name, and featuring insider accounts and incendiary corporate audiotapes and videotapes — the worst of which find Enron traders laughing and praying for wildfire and earthquakes as they induce California’s artificial power shortages of 2000-01 and reap windfall profits from the gouging — this is as emotionally destructive a movie as you’re likely to see any given year, because it’s all true. The brilliant achievement, though, is that Gibney takes what could simply be boisterous denunciation and turns it into a call to action, a screaming cautionary tale of pride, arrogance, outsized greed, ambition and intolerance all run amok over “the little guy.”

It’s all too easy — fish in a barrel, really — to demonize the bad guys of Enron. They deserve it, make no mistake. Asleep-at-the-wheel Lay’s ridiculous cloak of moral rectitude doesn't stand up to the righteous anger of those called to represent the thousands he instructed to keep their savings invested in company stock while he and other executives engaged in a behind-closed-doors fire sale. But to stop there is to miss the larger point: that the Enron scandal is important because it takes the predatory nature of big business and money-hungry capitalism to its logical extension — an insidious, incremental creep into fraudulence. The company did not exist in some bubble, and it’s not an exception to the rule; it’s a jaw-dropping, eye-opening of the way things too often work, as the collateral damage destruction of accounting firm Arthur Andersen and tainting of a wide number of savings and loans and financial lenders complicit in Enron’s schemes (and if you have a credit card, chances are they’re one of your companies) amply demonstrate.

Narrated by Peter Coyote, Gibney’s documentary traces the rise and fall of the company with remarkable clarity, and it’s surprising how heart-rending it is without dipping into cheap sentimentality (the defrauded pensioners are embodied only by one PGE utility line worker, who saw his life savings of $350,000 shrink to $1,2000). Skilling comes across the purveyor of a corporate culture that allowed for corruption and decay, but Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow is the architect of its fiscal shell games. The film, though, comes full circle, developing into a disquisition on the nature of evil — is it amorality, willful negligence in the pursuit of personal gain, or perhaps an overlapping combination of the two?

In the end, it's the numbers that start to hit you again. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room will likely make you mad as hell. The question is whether or not you’re going to take it anymore. (Magnolia, unrated, 109 minutes)