Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room

Synopsis: A detailed account of the implosion of Enron, one of the biggest corporations in America.

It is a thing of wonder that no matter how many times Americans are shown how the “free” market is a cynical cartel of big business and political frontmen and their obliging apparatchiks they continue to wave the flag for The American Way.

Alex Gibney’s documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, which he based on a book of the same name by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind is a harrowing depiction of consequences of making money one's raison’d’etre: nobody comes out with clean hands in the scramble to get rich.

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is a detailed if somewhat over-dramatized account of the way that Enron went from being one of the hottest Fortune 500 companies to scandal-mired bankrupt as its top executives cooked the books and a raft of top American banks, accounting firms and lawyers got on board in a “greed is good” culture of "synergistic corruption" whose tentacles reached into the Bush administration.
Gibney assembles a number of talking heads, unfortunately none of the accused, to describe how from the deregulatory years of Reagan’s presidency through the stock market boom of the late-1990s, the Texas-based company grew into 7th largest corporation in the US by 2000.

Having some knowledge of how corporations and money markets work would help as not only is there a lot of information here but Gibney illustrates virtually every idea with some kind of visual equivalent meaning that one must stay on the qui vive to follow the Byzantine path of deception as top dogs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling with the help of a willing lieutenant, Andy Fastow, built a fabulous house of cards (“over a pool of gasoline" as one observer wittily puts it ) often using downright fraudulent and deceptive practices to deceive investors.  Eventually the house came tumbling down but not until the top executives had cashed in their stock (one clever executive got out at the top with $250m) leaving 20,000 employees holding worthless options and empty pension funds.

At the end of the day, whilst the actual facts of the matter are fascinating what is most interesting about Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is the human capacity for deception and, in particular, self-deception.  In this respect the film at one point cites a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram which demonstrated the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure even if it meant performing acts which conflicted with their personal values. Whether the authority figure at Enron were the actual bosses or some more nebulous superego/ideological entity called “success” the degree to which people were willing to lie to themselves and others is truly frightening.

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