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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room [2006]


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Editorial
Synopsis

This searing examination of the Enron accounting scandal reveals the psychology of greed and corporate corruption that facilitated the company's rise to power and also its fall. When Enron went bankrupt in 2001, the principals walked away millionaires--but later faced legal proceedings and jail sentences. Meanwhile, many employees and investors were left with nothing, not even their retirement savings. Shedding light on the new economy of the 1990s when predictions and book-cooking flourished without actual profits, the film shows how it was not Enron alone but a network of bankers, traders, and accountants who turned a blind eye to the company's clearly suspicious numbers. CEO Ken Lay and top dogs Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow give candid interviews that illustrate their skill at deflecting hard questions and egotistically boasting about the company's success. In one of the company's cold and calculated moves--which caused the California power outages, and lead to the ousting of governor Gray Davis--Enron employees are shown laughing at forest fires. Footage of employees reveals greed, lust for risk-taking, and cheating, all while thinking they could never be caught. Finally, a few brave whistle-blowers stepped forward, including Bethany McLean, author of the Enron novel upon which this film is based, who wrote an article in Fortune magazine calling the company's bluff. A remarkable documentary which packages the events of the scandal into a cohesive story.


The rise and fall of one of the US's biggest businesses
Review date: 2008-03-17 Rating: 8 out of 10

The collapse of the energy giant Enron, was perhaps the greatest financial scandal in history, a company that went from a share value of tens of billions of dollars to bankruptcy in less than one month. Alex Gibney's chilling documentary takes what could be a complex, financially dense story and turns in into a comprehensible and engrossing documentary.

Based on Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's book of the same name, Gibney's film lays bare the sordid details at the heart of what was at one time, one of the United State's richest and most powerful companies, a company whose Chief Executive Officer was on first name terms with George W. Bush. Gibney shows how 'creative' accounting allowed projects that did not turn a penny in profit could be re-imagined as massive revenue streams, how America's oldest accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, signed off on such dubious financial practices (a one million dollars a day fee possibly helped), how Enron's losses were hidden in labyrinthine corporate webs, with shell companies 'buying' loss-making operations, how the energy market in California was grossly manipulated, leading to huge profits for Enron and an electrical blackout for some of the state's residents and ultimately, how lying and greed resulted in tens of millions of dollars in bonuses for a few at the top, empty pension funds for the rest of the employees.

With copious interviews, Gibney shows how, when Enron was making big bucks, everybody wanted a piece of the pie - the accounting firms, the lawyers, the banks like Chase, Credit Suisse and Citibank - everybody had their hand out. A macho culture of "step on the other guy's neck" allowed traders to make money hand over fist without having to worry about the consequences of their actions.

In keeping with the another excellent documentary on big business, The Corporation, filmmaker Alex Gibney argues that Enron wasn't an aberrant operation - an extreme example perhaps but not (obviously) unimaginable. Rather, Enron seems to suggest that such an event happened once and could happen again, that this is the quite logical result when the legal fiction that are corporate entities are mandated by law to have only one concern, which is the bottom line. The possibility that positive social effects might be spun off from such activity is permissible only if it enhances the company's reputation and therefore value.

All of this and so much more is made quite clear in this engaging film. Alex gibney has digested a great deal of material and presented it in such a way that no foreknowledge is required; characters are introduced, plots are hatched, money is made, cracks appear and eventually meltdown ensues. The rise and fall of the crooked E is a fine documentary film and a shot across the bows for the American economy.

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Reviews


Shocker
Review date: 2008-02-15 Rating: 10 out of 10

I bought this DVD to better understand the complex situation surrounding the collapse of Enron. Having no understanding of finance the myriad of books and news articles shed little light on the contoversy for me.
So I watched this and it suddenly became clear what all the fuss as about.
Peter Coyote does a great job of narrating this sorry tale and good direction keeps us wrapt up the story.
Easily accesible to anyone.

A documentary
Review date: 2007-09-19 Rating: 8 out of 10

Didn't know what this was going to be like when I rented it from Amazon. I was surprised and disappointed to find it was a documentary and not a film.

I had to force myself to stay with it as I was in no mood for a documentary, but you find yourself being drawn in to the DVD wanting a bit more info, then I found myself yawning only to be drawn back in again.

It was a very interesting DVD, It is watchable, but don`t expect bubble gum TV from it, and your be amazed what the so called smartest people in the room got away with.

The sickest guys in the room
Review date: 2007-04-29 Rating: 10 out of 10

Bethany McLean, who along with Peter Elkind, wrote the book from which this documentary was adapted, is clearly satisfied with herself as she sits on a couch relating what she knows about the fall of Enron. And she should be. She was the one who first really pursued the question, "How does Enron make money?" What she didn't know when she first asked the question is that they make money the old-fashioned way, they steal it.

What I was most forcibly struck with while watching this fascinating story is how much all the posturing and lying and misrepresenting of the talking heads, Jeff Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al., reminded me of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., in the White House. The key similarity is the use of their power over the media and in front of a podium to mislead the minions and the public to their advantage. Without the ability to lie to large numbers of people at the same time, and to stifle and belittle contrary voices, they would not have succeeded.

But also there is the complacency and the complicity of not just the greedy stockholders and the adoring employees, but the greater public who failed to ask not "why?" but "how?" In the case of Enron, how can a company exceed not only all expectations, but something like the law of financial gravity? If it looks too good to be true and nobody can give you a clear answer to how it's done--guess what? It is too good to be true. It may seem a stretch, but the same kind of mentality continues to persuade Nigerian scammers and "Congratulations: You've Won!!!" emailers that there are still fat bank accounts in America just waiting to be emptied. Nobody wanted to look too closely because nobody wanted to prick a bubble. Instead everybody wanted to believe that things that go up never have to come down (at least not now), and that the smartest guys in the room really were, and thanks to them we are all going to get rich, or at least we can applaud and admire from the sidelines.

Another failure is that of not looking critically at the cultural climate and the mentality of the traders and their bosses, whose morality (in the form of emails and public pronouncements) was that of people who would cheat their best friend, who would steal from widows and orphans (no exaggeration: they did) and laugh about it.

And the bankers and the brokerage firms, the federal watch dogs and the Congress--where were they? Lapping it up like lap dogs, getting paid off or having their campaigns funded by the robber barons at Enron. Greed is good! It's the American way! Deregulate everything! The police force, the army; and free enterprise and the magical, invisible hand of the marketplace will bring us unprecedented and unparalleled riches. Burp!

No, the honchos at Enron were not the smartest guys in the room. They were the sickest. Smart guys would have made a good living, maybe even enough to buy that house on the hill, a vacation home in some warm clime, while having banked and invested enough to send the kids and grandkids to good schools, and been satisfied. They might even have taken some pride in the work they were doing. But how can you take pride in your work when you are essentially stealing from others, especially when you are stealing from the very people who work for you and trust you? The smartest guys in the room would not have thrown so much time and energy into ripping people off, into gratifying a warped desire to financially lord it over others. They would not be those who cared more about ratcheting up their millions than they did about anything else in life. People who care about winning so massively and so cruelly are not smart. They aren't even well. They are the sickest guys in the room.

Alex Gibney (who also wrote and produced the excellent The Trials of Henry Kissinger 2002) is to be commended for making the kind of documentary that informs, enlightens and appalls. The footage from corporate meetings, press conferences, company skits (oh, what fun they had!) and interviews with the principals and those they ruined make for a most engaging moral lesson. The story unfolds like some kind of pathological tragedy from inside a fascist state or like the neoconned White House where public pronouncements are made with only one goal in mind: deception. What fools these morals be. And the biggest fools are the greediest whose lives are lived in empty pursuit of nothing more than naked power with which they can buy nothing of value that they didn't already have.

Neither entertainment nor documentary
Review date: 2006-11-12 Rating: 4 out of 10

I bought this at a time when I was very interested in finance. I wanted to know how the normal mechanisms of accountancy and audit had broken down in this case, so that I might see the tell-tale signs in any companies that I might invest in. This film contained very few facts and very little insight into what happened.

Of course, the film could have succeeded in other ways; but i didn't see any in-depth portrayal of the human dramas it caused to the public or dramatizations of the events within the company. It was only a compendium of the news items from the media, with little added value. For a better treatment of when things go wrong in high finance, try Rogue Trader [1999] where you will get characterization, human drama, comedy and some understanding of investment banking.

Product Details/Specifications


Director(s):

Recording label: Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd
Manufacturer: Lions Gate Home Ent. UK Ltd
EAN: 5060052410726
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL,
Release date: 2007-09-10
Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 110 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2005
Language: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired)
Language: English (Subtitled)
Language: English (Original Language)

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