BuzzFlash Reviews

January 3, 2006

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (DVD, 2005)
Director: Alex Gibney

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We all know that the Bush family was puckered up as tightly to Ken Lay as Geraldo Rivera is to a TV camera, but until seeing "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," we had no idea how emblematic of the Bush Administration Enron was.

Because, as this revealing documentary shows, Enron was a complete con job, a house of cards built upon a sham accounting system. It was all boasting, packaging, public relations, and intimidation. As the finances of Enron deteriorated, its stock price soared because Lay, Skilling, Fastow and others knew how to sell an image of a dynamic company that was on the cutting edge of innovation. Reality didn't matter.

But like the Bush Administration, Enron was nothing more than "the sell" and "the squeeze." These were crooks with a knife, a smile, and were complete sociopaths. They had no interest in their stockholders or their employees. Everyone else involved in Enron, except the top execs who cashed out because they knew the implosion was coming, got left holding the bag. Just think of it as the American economy as the Bush Administration skims the dollars off for the rich as our economic engine comes to the brink of bankruptcy.

The director of "Enron" knew that he couldn't make a documentary about accounting: it would be too boring. So, he made a movie about "the scam" and about the personalities who carried off the heist. And that's what makes it so compelling.

Bush I and Bush II both make cameo appearances that reveal beyond any reasonable doubt their close "friendship" with Ken Lay, who gave them and the Republican Party tons of money. But the movie focuses on the rise and fall of Enron itself, not its political connection to Bush, although that is part and parcel of like minds finding kindred spirits and working together to fleece the American public.

The amazing thing about "Enron" is how compelling the story is told, brought to the screen with great directorial skill, so that it is as riveting as a crime caper, which it is. The section of the film that conclusively reveals how Enron manipulated the energy markets in California to temporarily stave off its own collapse is riveting. But so is the rest of the movie.

"Enron" has incriminating audiotapes of traders, documents, witnesses -- and it moves at a steady clip, so you never get dazed by the accounting "magic." In fact, it is positively seductive, just as the Enron executive team was itself.

The documentary is based on the best-selling book, which grew out of a "Fortune" magazine article that turned out to be the first shoe to drop in Enron's unraveling. As a New York Times critic commented, the film is "a fascinating chronicle of arrogance and greed."

The Bush Administration in a nutshell. If Bush is our "CEO," Enron is his corporate model.

By the way, there are all sorts of extra features included in this DVD, including "Enron Company Skits" and "Enron" commercials.

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