'Enron.' To anyone born after 1995, it's a word likely to conjure blank stares - or 'wasn't he that Elf Agent Smith played in Lord of the Rings?' But, for those who lived through the largest corporate bankruptcy of the 20th century, Enron was far from a fantasy: it was a crime drama crossed with a disaster movie that broke the lives of its former employees more than Y2K ever would have. Enron was All the President's Men mashed up with Wall Street, directed by the Coen brothers, starring Tony Stark and Hannibal Lecter, as scripted by Tennessee Williams. There's even a third act cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger (no, really!). You couldn't make this stuff up.
Director Alex Gibney is wise enough to understand that doing justice to the Enron scandal requires two things: a) embracing the crazy head-on, and b) acknowledging that, for the vast majority of the world, energy trading, even the most unscrupulous kind, is unbelievably boring. After all, how else could a formerly inauspicious oil and gas company inflate itself into one of the most (faux-) successful companies of all time simply by, essentially, bluffing, and assuming the fine print would be too boring for anyone to check? Thankfully, Gibney is unafraid to peek under the dinosaur's skirt. Working off the novel of real-life intrepid journalist Bethany McLean, who lit the fuse of Enron's downfall (and also pops up here to issue words of cautionary wisdom), Gibney employs a bevy of talking heads, diagrams and simulations (cleverly crafted with the same wonky animation and contemptuous, snarky humour that Enron employed for their own PSAs) to succinctly boil down the obfuscating smoke-and-mirrors bullsh*t that allowed Enron to boast its way to a multi-billion dollar stock worth. His account - accessible as it is aggravating, titillating as it is tragic - is so plainly spelled out, that it's enough to make his entire audience feel like The Smartest Guys in the Room.
The story of Enron may be sordidly funny in its lunacy (at least for those unaffected by the bankruptcy), but Gibney crafts it like a murder mystery. Opening with the eerie snarls of Tom Waits' 'What's He Building In There,' the film preludes the unfolding cascade of corruption, cocaine, trading, strippers, dirt bikes, blackouts, and Bush with the suicide of an Enron former senior executive to keep a poignantly sour taste in our mouths, reminding us it's all fun and games until someone loses their soul, reputation, and life. Framed by Peter Coyote's coyly dry narration and an ingeniously catchy soundtrack (anyone who juxtaposes Tom Waits with Dusty Springfield is all right in my books), Gibney's documentarian style is playful but unobtrusive, and, above all else, clear. He devotes consummate care to unpacking the duplicitous accounting practices Enron exploited for their own short-term commercial gain, making them comprehensible without being dumbed down: mark-to-market (essentially determining present value by hypothetical future profits), and offloading and burying debt in sleazy, fictional dummy companies (with monikers as tasteful as "Death Star" and "M. Yass"). It's an emotional rollercoaster throughout, tonally rollicking between a cringe, the darkest of guffaws, and a sadly befuddled head shake, but Gibney rides the wave with breezy aplomb.
But, above all else, The Smartest Guys in the Room cottons on to Enron's fundamentally cinematic quality, and Gibney leans on the scandal's uncanny, stranger-than-fiction Hollywood tropes to make sense of the gas-bags who conned the stock market and the business world through brazen confidence and staggering, Icarian arrogance. Here (each introduced with their own Guardians of the Galaxy-esq musical motifs), we have Ken Lay - the political patriarch with the charm of the South, and the heart of a James Bond villain. Jeffrey Skilling - a Revenge of the Nerds turned Time Magazine darling cautionary tale, whose insidiously clever rule-bending lent him a swan song worthy of Macbeth. There's Andy Fastow, the Gordon Gekko accountant who spat in the face of the rules with Han Solo cockiness, and Lou Pai - the batsh*t executive who leapt off the sinking Enron ship to buy up most of Colorado with his pregnant stripper girlfriend - who... is too cartoonish to befit fictional counterpart. And, propping them up, an army of frat boy stock traders, whose boorish braying (opening mocking the "Grandma Millies" who lost power and lives as they whimsically whiplashed the deregulated California energy market), and coke-addled, bug-eyed grins, cheerfully admitting they'd literally stomp on each other's throats for a bonus.
Such was their ballsiness that making a documentary of them is less a matter of Gibney corralling footage and mouthpieces, and more a matter of him stepping out of the way, and letting them string their own proverbial nooses with their own hubris. So outlandish were they, that playwright Lucy Prebble was able to lift an alarming amount of direct quotes for her West End production that play like satirical hyperbole (Skilling's "What's the difference between the state of California and the Titanic? At least when the Titanic went down, the lights were on," and Lay's 9/11 response - "Just as American is under attack from terrorists, so are we under attack at Enron" can duke it out for the most tasteless). The lot of them would be slammed as caricatures in a Hollywood screenplay, but, captured sans social performance in their primal d**chebaggery... suddenly Enron becomes more chilling horror movie than documentary.
Years before Margot Robbie explained the real estate market in a bathtub and Leonardo DiCaprio blew a candle out of a prostitute's hindquarters came Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, still solidly holding its place as the third most entertaining film about the stock market. It's dazzlingly accessible and informative, and about as fun as an emotionally devastating movie about the fallout of a capitalism supernova could be. And, if there's even the slightest truth to Gibney's closing assertions that Enron paved the way for even more duplicitous corporate corruption, Enron's disturbing, mice-headed techno-dystopic 90s PR videos got one thing right: always, always, always ask "Why?" -9.5/10
Director Alex Gibney is wise enough to understand that doing justice to the Enron scandal requires two things: a) embracing the crazy head-on, and b) acknowledging that, for the vast majority of the world, energy trading, even the most unscrupulous kind, is unbelievably boring. After all, how else could a formerly inauspicious oil and gas company inflate itself into one of the most (faux-) successful companies of all time simply by, essentially, bluffing, and assuming the fine print would be too boring for anyone to check? Thankfully, Gibney is unafraid to peek under the dinosaur's skirt. Working off the novel of real-life intrepid journalist Bethany McLean, who lit the fuse of Enron's downfall (and also pops up here to issue words of cautionary wisdom), Gibney employs a bevy of talking heads, diagrams and simulations (cleverly crafted with the same wonky animation and contemptuous, snarky humour that Enron employed for their own PSAs) to succinctly boil down the obfuscating smoke-and-mirrors bullsh*t that allowed Enron to boast its way to a multi-billion dollar stock worth. His account - accessible as it is aggravating, titillating as it is tragic - is so plainly spelled out, that it's enough to make his entire audience feel like The Smartest Guys in the Room.
The story of Enron may be sordidly funny in its lunacy (at least for those unaffected by the bankruptcy), but Gibney crafts it like a murder mystery. Opening with the eerie snarls of Tom Waits' 'What's He Building In There,' the film preludes the unfolding cascade of corruption, cocaine, trading, strippers, dirt bikes, blackouts, and Bush with the suicide of an Enron former senior executive to keep a poignantly sour taste in our mouths, reminding us it's all fun and games until someone loses their soul, reputation, and life. Framed by Peter Coyote's coyly dry narration and an ingeniously catchy soundtrack (anyone who juxtaposes Tom Waits with Dusty Springfield is all right in my books), Gibney's documentarian style is playful but unobtrusive, and, above all else, clear. He devotes consummate care to unpacking the duplicitous accounting practices Enron exploited for their own short-term commercial gain, making them comprehensible without being dumbed down: mark-to-market (essentially determining present value by hypothetical future profits), and offloading and burying debt in sleazy, fictional dummy companies (with monikers as tasteful as "Death Star" and "M. Yass"). It's an emotional rollercoaster throughout, tonally rollicking between a cringe, the darkest of guffaws, and a sadly befuddled head shake, but Gibney rides the wave with breezy aplomb.
But, above all else, The Smartest Guys in the Room cottons on to Enron's fundamentally cinematic quality, and Gibney leans on the scandal's uncanny, stranger-than-fiction Hollywood tropes to make sense of the gas-bags who conned the stock market and the business world through brazen confidence and staggering, Icarian arrogance. Here (each introduced with their own Guardians of the Galaxy-esq musical motifs), we have Ken Lay - the political patriarch with the charm of the South, and the heart of a James Bond villain. Jeffrey Skilling - a Revenge of the Nerds turned Time Magazine darling cautionary tale, whose insidiously clever rule-bending lent him a swan song worthy of Macbeth. There's Andy Fastow, the Gordon Gekko accountant who spat in the face of the rules with Han Solo cockiness, and Lou Pai - the batsh*t executive who leapt off the sinking Enron ship to buy up most of Colorado with his pregnant stripper girlfriend - who... is too cartoonish to befit fictional counterpart. And, propping them up, an army of frat boy stock traders, whose boorish braying (opening mocking the "Grandma Millies" who lost power and lives as they whimsically whiplashed the deregulated California energy market), and coke-addled, bug-eyed grins, cheerfully admitting they'd literally stomp on each other's throats for a bonus.
Such was their ballsiness that making a documentary of them is less a matter of Gibney corralling footage and mouthpieces, and more a matter of him stepping out of the way, and letting them string their own proverbial nooses with their own hubris. So outlandish were they, that playwright Lucy Prebble was able to lift an alarming amount of direct quotes for her West End production that play like satirical hyperbole (Skilling's "What's the difference between the state of California and the Titanic? At least when the Titanic went down, the lights were on," and Lay's 9/11 response - "Just as American is under attack from terrorists, so are we under attack at Enron" can duke it out for the most tasteless). The lot of them would be slammed as caricatures in a Hollywood screenplay, but, captured sans social performance in their primal d**chebaggery... suddenly Enron becomes more chilling horror movie than documentary.
Years before Margot Robbie explained the real estate market in a bathtub and Leonardo DiCaprio blew a candle out of a prostitute's hindquarters came Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, still solidly holding its place as the third most entertaining film about the stock market. It's dazzlingly accessible and informative, and about as fun as an emotionally devastating movie about the fallout of a capitalism supernova could be. And, if there's even the slightest truth to Gibney's closing assertions that Enron paved the way for even more duplicitous corporate corruption, Enron's disturbing, mice-headed techno-dystopic 90s PR videos got one thing right: always, always, always ask "Why?" -9.5/10