Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Review
by Susan Granger (ssg722 AT aol DOT com)April 26th, 2005
Susan Granger's review of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" (Magnolia Pictures)
As timely as today's court prosecutions, this insightful documentary demonstrates how avaricious top execs Kenneth L. Lay, Jeffrey K. Skilling and Andy Fastow were not only greedy and arrogant but supremely confident that they could shuffle the corporate ledgers - until their Texas-based energy-trading company completely collapsed. Once the seventh-largest corporation in America, Enron's value fell from an all-time high of $90 per share to about 30 cents per share.
Based on the best-seller by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, writer/director Alex Gibney ("The Trials of Henry Kissinger") has assembled an impressive array of straightforward yet incendiary material: unofficial archival data, in-house video clips of company meetings, Congressional hearings and TV talk-shows. That's augmented by clarifying commentary from stock analysts and angry former Enron employees who felt betrayed - like whistleblower Sharon Watkins. Amanda Martin Brock, Colin Whitehead and Mike Muckleroy.
As the scandalous, shocking inside-story unfolds, even the Enron connection to California's rolling blackouts back in 2000 and 2001 becomes clear as audio tapes reveal eager Enron traders telling West Coast power plants that they should shut down, thereby effectively inflating power prices during that harrowing energy crisis, then chortling, "Burn, baby, burn!"
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is an intriguing, infuriating 9, a civics and ethics lesson for every American citizen. See how the savvy, smirking Enron executives simply took the money and ran from the bankruptcy, leaving investors and employees with nothing. Now the question is: will they get away with it?
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