Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Review by Adam Weeks

Early in February 2001, “Fortune” magazine writer Bethany McLean interviewed several prominent executives employed by one of the largest natural gas companies in North America; it’s a little place you may have heard of from time to time, a company that operated under the name of Enron.

The resulting article, “Is Enron Overpriced?” asked a very simple question that no-one seemed to be able to provide an answer for, “How exactly does Enron make its money?”

It was a question that is (deservedly) given much credit as being the protagonist of the beginning of the end for a company that once held a market valuation of 70 billion dollars (US), and ended in bankruptcy just 10 months later to the tune of over 66 billion dollars in debt, and ties to the political world that extended all the way to the White House.

Director Alex Gibney’s fascinating look at the downfall of this empire, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room based on the book by Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind, is a real life, modern day version of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, where every character is a Gordon Gekko.

The famous catchphrase of “Greed Is Good” hangs over the proceedings of Enron, which ultimately is the story of a moderately successful company that had big ambitions, got a little bit too greedy, and finally imploded from the continuous barrages of misinformation and complete falsehoods that the puppet masters themselves portrayed to their own employees and shareholders.

One of the participants sums it up the best when he says that Enron was “A house of cards that was built on a pool of gasoline”.

It is most certainly a damning portrayal of the key players such as COO Jeff Skilling, CFO Andy Fastow & CEO Ken Lay that pulls no punches in proclaiming them as the people responsible for the disastrous enterprise (and the titular “smartest guys”), but with both archival footage and new evidence at his disposal, Gibney isn’t exactly pulling a “Michael Moore” here by twisting facts to his own purposes - the facts speak for themselves, and the facts are that these people deceived everyone around them and cost millions of people billions of dollars while they lined their own nests with multi-million dollar paydays.

This is easily evident in examples such as the California energy crisis, in which Enron staff advised power plants to “be creative” in coming up with ways to shut down for maintenance, and in turn forcing rolling blackouts which served to drive up the price of power, all along creating windfalls of cash. Even more incredible was the concept that (amazingly) passed through the SEC of “Mark to Market”, which enabled Enron to project future earnings rather than actuals, allowing once again for an almost unlimited honey pot.

At one point, we hear a very true example of the Enron story boiled down to the essentials, which basically says that as a business, if you fudge the numbers just a little bit, the following year you have to fudge them just a little bit more, and the next a little more until it simply can’t be stopped.

Great insights are provided on each of the principals and situations involved in the story, and through footage provided from CNN & C-Span as well as Enron promotional materials and recordings, The Smartest Guys In The Room manages a difficult task in Documentary film-making by giving you the illusion that all of it is happening in the here and now, and you are voyeuristically watching this mammoth car crash happen in real time.

Enron’s company slogan was “Ask Why,” and because someone did, the public watched one of the greatest tales of corporate greed in the world unfold before their eyes.

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is a fantastic visual account of that story, that every big business and entrepreneur out there should pay close attention to before fudging that bottom line just a little bit.

4 out of 5

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Australian release: Thursday the 13th of October, 2005
Cast: Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow.
Director: Alex Gibney.
Website: Click here.

Brought to you by MovieHole