Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The Houston-based Enron has become a byword for the corporate chicanery of the last decade, thanks to plenty of news coverage about the company's duplicitous accounting. But most Americans are probably still hazy about the precise facts of the scandal, and Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room nicely fills in the blanks, taking a tone of almost bemused amazement that such a grotesque perversion of business ethics could have gone undetected and unpunished for so long. Of course, Gibney is fortunate that Enron left behind such a huge archive of its own malfeasance that even frenzied last-minute efforts to purge the files came up way short. Part of the material presented here consists of filmed pep rallies given to bolster employee morale by Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and other executives as the company devised more and more “innovative” means to expand its activities and bolster its balance sheet. But these exercises in subterfuge are put into context by the clear, crisp narration delivered by Peter Coyote, news clips, excerpts from interviews with corporate whistleblowers and journalists, and portions of Congressional hearings in which company executives were grilled. Though at times a bit too hip for the room, on the whole this is an informative, amusing, and occasionally infuriating documentary. Highly recommended. [Note: DVD extras include audio commentary by writer/director Alex Gibney, four deleted scenes (20 min.), a 14-minute “making-of” featurette, HDNet's “Higher Definition: The Enron Show” (13 min.), conversations with authors Bethany McLean (8 min.) and Peter Elkind (5 min.), Gibney's readings of script skit selections (5 min.), “Firesign Theatre Presents: The Fall of Enron” (4 min.), a “Where Are They Now?” featurette (3 min.), a gallery of Enron cartoons, the original Fortune magazine articles, web links, and trailers. Bottom line: an excellent extras package for a fine documentary.] (F. Swietek)