It was sad to see how many people genuinely believed in the validity and honesty of the company.
I found myself shocked and angry, but also oddly intrigued by this investigation of the people involved in this corporate cesspool. Last but not least, we're given short glimpses of the smaller players - the traders caught disgracefully cold and uncaring on recorded phone calls, the investors left bankrupt, the naïve workers suddenly confronted by the dark dealings of their employer and scammed of their pensions and retirement funds, and the few men and women - particuarly the brave whistle blowing Sharon Watkins - who helped reveal Enron as a sinkhole of massive proportion. We're thrust into the life of Andy Fastow - the deserving scapegoat who escorted Enron from deception to outright Faustian fraud, a shrill investor who propped up stocks while stashing debt in shell companies to artificially inflate profit margins. We're briefly confronted with Liu Pai - the Skilling loyalist and lieutenant who cashes out of the company with a cool $250 million, a seemingly meek bulldog obsessed with strippers and crooked deals. We jump to Ken Rice - the manic depressive marketeer of madness who becomes increasingly agitated as Enron blatantly manipulates the truth to stay afloat. We meet Enron's CEO, Jeff Skilling - the architect of the company's scandalous practices and an engaging and inspirational leader that could seemingly sell oxygen in a bottle. We're introduced to the company's chairman, Ken Lay - the most public face of the fiasco and an apparent emperor without clothes who turns a blind eye to the unethical practices of his minions. Divided into easy to follow vignettes that chart both the company and its key villains, a morality tale emerges about pride and some people's all-consuming lust of money. The reason 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room' works so well is because it quickly takes the focus away from numbers and places it on people. Based on the best selling book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind and narrated expertly by actor Peter Coyote, the film documents the rise and fall of an expansive house of cards that changed the way we view Big Business. Writer and director Alex Gibney weaves a thorough and well-structured narrative of the events leading to the collapse of one of America's most powerful corporations. This well-paced documentary is less than two hours long and, by the end, I much more fully understood the daunting complexities that left me tired and out of breath throughout three long months of classes. To be honest, I was dreading this review of 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room' because I was terrified of simply not getting it once again.Īpparently, I had a lousy professor.
The story was so vast, the players so entrenched, and the numbers so steeped in high level accounting that I barely stayed afloat. To cut to the chase, I barely pulled off a "C" and it was thanks, in no small part, to my complete inability to comprehend the intricate web of deceit that Enron execs had manufactured against millions of people. I was enrolled in the last general study course I needed to pull off a bachelor's degree in English Lit - and that class happened to be Macro Economics. The Enron scandal had just begun to reverberate across the United States when I was in my last year of college.
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