Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) 8/10
“It had taken Enron 16 years to go from about 10 billion in assets to 65 billion in assests; it took them 24 days to go bankrupt”
Yet another fascinating documentary from 2005, Enron is proof that reality can be more compelling than fiction. The tale of corporate hubris brims with greed and arrogance, a searing indictment on the modern day fantasy called Enron. Nowadays synonomous with corruption, greed and failure, its hard to imagine a time not so long ago when Enron was the poster child of corporate America, the company that was feted by no less than Fortune magazine and boasted ties with the Bush family, no less.
But all that came crumbling down in one of the biggest corporate fraud and bankruptcy in American History. While Enron is ostensibly a documentary, it is also a morality tale and a horror story. Watching Enron crash and burn, and the actual footage of Enron CEOs lie through their teeth, encouraging their employees top buy Enron shares while secretly offloading their shares will make any sensible person bristle at such wanton greed.
Competantly edited with a decent soundtrack, the film goes abit overboard in trying to draw connections between Enron and the Bush administration but merely manages allusions without concrete proof. It is at its strongest when it uses actual footage to speak for itself, and no scene is more damning than the words of the CEOs themselves. More importantly, it is presented in such a simple, and easy to understand narrative that even a layman can more or less understand how Enron managed to cook the books and inflate profit.
While other films like Syriana try to draw connections between oil and corruption, with little success, Enron simply tells a devastatingly true story that is unwavering in intensity. The characterisation of the main players of the scandal: Skelling, Lay, Fastow et.al will both disgust and fascinate you. This is the film you absolutely have to see before you make another investment, or invest in a company’s shares.
Watching Enron is like watching a car careen out of control before erupting into a gigantic fireball and taking everyone with them. We derive a certain kind of vicarious pleasure in this modern day horror story of capitalistic meltdown that is far more thrilling that watching the earth freeze over in The Day After Tomorrow. An insightful and compelling tale which is highly reccommended.
