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
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)