"Government is not the solution to our problems," former President Reagan is shown saying in video clip early in this documentary. "Government is the problem."
When I came across Roger Ebert's review of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and saw that he pronounced it a film about crime rather than a political film, I couldn't help but chuckle. It's hard to watch--or rewatch--the story of the Great Enron Collapse without thinking that the culture which created these crooks is the same good ol' boy business network that put one of their own in office for the past two terms. Enron was the largest contributor to the first Presidential campaign of George W. Bush, but "Kenny Boy," as Dubyah called CEO Ken Lay, was even closer to George Sr. In fact, it was the first President Bush who worked closely with Lay to push the country toward the deregulation that spawned Enron.
Based on the book The Smartest Guys in the Room, this intelligent film by Alex Gibney fights the urge to comment using a smug or sarcastic voice, as Michael Moore did in "Fahrenheit 9/11." There's also not as much Moore-like speculation or provocatively pitched juxtapositions. This film lets the evidence speak for itself, augmented by talking-heads interviews with insiders who reveal what was going on at the time. Sometimes the lines sound too good to be true, as if the interviews themselves were rehearsed, but that's not something Gibney addresses in his commentary, so we'll never know. Regardless, the evidence is damning enough, as you well know now, with Enron president Jeffrey Skilling serving time in prison and Lay dying before he could join him.
Watching it now, after the trial and all of the other business-related scandals in today's headlines, I thought that I would find myself as tired of it all as Watergate a year after the break-in. But you know what? It's still fascinating, which speaks volumes about the way that this Oscar-nominated documentary was crafted.
The seventh largest corporation in the U.S. with a CEO who made more than 300 million dollars per year collapsed because of "mark-to-market" fraudulent accounting and "pump and drop" practices--with executives driving up the company's stock prices and then selling off all of their own personal shares. That left 20,000 employees without jobs. Worse, the two million dollars in the employee pension fund also vanished.
It's hard not to think of this as political when we're shown clips of Dubyah making calls on Ken Lay's behalf or appearing with dad on an intimate video greeting saying how much Enron has meant to the Bush family (and vice versa). But to Gibney's credit, he doesn't go down that road. The Bush family is not his target. It's the Smartest Guys in the Room, and their way of working was as Wild West as Texas. It was a macho culture that they created, with dangerous company trips and an odd, cutthroat practice of having the employees vote to eliminate 15 percent of low-producing employees every year. It was a culture of risk-taking, with loose cannons rewarded rather than cautioned. o-authors Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean appear in a number of clips to talk about their research, but the fact that Gibney was able to get so many insider video clips after the shredding of evidence began is nothing short of astounding. Though we know what happened and know the outcome, the information is presented within a narrative structure that sustains our interest, while the details of the collapse (and fraud) are so incredible that it seems straight out of Ripley's. Maybe that's why "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is still an effective documentary to watch.
When I came across Roger Ebert's review of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and saw that he pronounced it a film about crime rather than a political film, I couldn't help but chuckle. It's hard to watch--or rewatch--the story of the Great Enron Collapse without thinking that the culture which created these crooks is the same good ol' boy business network that put one of their own in office for the past two terms. Enron was the largest contributor to the first Presidential campaign of George W. Bush, but "Kenny Boy," as Dubyah called CEO Ken Lay, was even closer to George Sr. In fact, it was the first President Bush who worked closely with Lay to push the country toward the deregulation that spawned Enron.
Based on the book The Smartest Guys in the Room, this intelligent film by Alex Gibney fights the urge to comment using a smug or sarcastic voice, as Michael Moore did in "Fahrenheit 9/11." There's also not as much Moore-like speculation or provocatively pitched juxtapositions. This film lets the evidence speak for itself, augmented by talking-heads interviews with insiders who reveal what was going on at the time. Sometimes the lines sound too good to be true, as if the interviews themselves were rehearsed, but that's not something Gibney addresses in his commentary, so we'll never know. Regardless, the evidence is damning enough, as you well know now, with Enron president Jeffrey Skilling serving time in prison and Lay dying before he could join him.
Watching it now, after the trial and all of the other business-related scandals in today's headlines, I thought that I would find myself as tired of it all as Watergate a year after the break-in. But you know what? It's still fascinating, which speaks volumes about the way that this Oscar-nominated documentary was crafted.
The seventh largest corporation in the U.S. with a CEO who made more than 300 million dollars per year collapsed because of "mark-to-market" fraudulent accounting and "pump and drop" practices--with executives driving up the company's stock prices and then selling off all of their own personal shares. That left 20,000 employees without jobs. Worse, the two million dollars in the employee pension fund also vanished.
It's hard not to think of this as political when we're shown clips of Dubyah making calls on Ken Lay's behalf or appearing with dad on an intimate video greeting saying how much Enron has meant to the Bush family (and vice versa). But to Gibney's credit, he doesn't go down that road. The Bush family is not his target. It's the Smartest Guys in the Room, and their way of working was as Wild West as Texas. It was a macho culture that they created, with dangerous company trips and an odd, cutthroat practice of having the employees vote to eliminate 15 percent of low-producing employees every year. It was a culture of risk-taking, with loose cannons rewarded rather than cautioned. o-authors Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean appear in a number of clips to talk about their research, but the fact that Gibney was able to get so many insider video clips after the shredding of evidence began is nothing short of astounding. Though we know what happened and know the outcome, the information is presented within a narrative structure that sustains our interest, while the details of the collapse (and fraud) are so incredible that it seems straight out of Ripley's. Maybe that's why "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is still an effective documentary to watch.
"Government is not the solution to our problems," former President Reagan is shown saying in video clip early in this documentary. "Government is the problem."
When I came across Roger Ebert's review of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and saw that he pronounced it a film about crime rather than a political film, I couldn't help but chuckle. It's hard to watch--or rewatch--the story of the Great Enron Collapse without thinking that the culture which created these crooks is the same good ol' boy business network that put one of their own in office for the past two terms. Enron was the largest contributor to the first Presidential campaign of George W. Bush, but "Kenny Boy," as Dubyah called CEO Ken Lay, was even closer to George Sr. In fact, it was the first President Bush who worked closely with Lay to push the country toward the deregulation that spawned Enron.
Based on the book The Smartest Guys in the Room, this intelligent film by Alex Gibney fights the urge to comment using a smug or sarcastic voice, as Michael Moore did in "Fahrenheit 9/11." There's also not as much Moore-like speculation or provocatively pitched juxtapositions. This film lets the evidence speak for itself, augmented by talking-heads interviews with insiders who reveal what was going on at the time. Sometimes the lines sound too good to be true, as if the interviews themselves were rehearsed, but that's not something Gibney addresses in his commentary, so we'll never know. Regardless, the evidence is damning enough, as you well know now, with Enron president Jeffrey Skilling serving time in prison and Lay dying before he could join him.
Watching it now, after the trial and all of the other business-related scandals in today's headlines, I thought that I would find myself as tired of it all as Watergate a year after the break-in. But you know what? It's still fascinating, which speaks volumes about the way that this Oscar-nominated documentary was crafted.
The seventh largest corporation in the U.S. with a CEO who made more than 300 million dollars per year collapsed because of "mark-to-market" fraudulent accounting and "pump and drop" practices--with executives driving up the company's stock prices and then selling off all of their own personal shares. That left 20,000 employees without jobs. Worse, the two million dollars in the employee pension fund also vanished.
It's hard not to think of this as political when we're shown clips of Dubyah making calls on Ken Lay's behalf or appearing with dad on an intimate video greeting saying how much Enron has meant to the Bush family (and vice versa). But to Gibney's credit, he doesn't go down that road. The Bush family is not his target. It's the Smartest Guys in the Room, and their way of working was as Wild West as Texas. It was a macho culture that they created, with dangerous company trips and an odd, cutthroat practice of having the employees vote to eliminate 15 percent of low-producing employees every year. It was a culture of risk-taking, with loose cannons rewarded rather than cautioned. o-authors Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean appear in a number of clips to talk about their research, but the fact that Gibney was able to get so many insider video clips after the shredding of evidence began is nothing short of astounding. Though we know what happened and know the outcome, the information is presented within a narrative structure that sustains our interest, while the details of the collapse (and fraud) are so incredible that it seems straight out of Ripley's. Maybe that's why "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is still an effective documentary to watch.
When I came across Roger Ebert's review of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" and saw that he pronounced it a film about crime rather than a political film, I couldn't help but chuckle. It's hard to watch--or rewatch--the story of the Great Enron Collapse without thinking that the culture which created these crooks is the same good ol' boy business network that put one of their own in office for the past two terms. Enron was the largest contributor to the first Presidential campaign of George W. Bush, but "Kenny Boy," as Dubyah called CEO Ken Lay, was even closer to George Sr. In fact, it was the first President Bush who worked closely with Lay to push the country toward the deregulation that spawned Enron.
Based on the book The Smartest Guys in the Room, this intelligent film by Alex Gibney fights the urge to comment using a smug or sarcastic voice, as Michael Moore did in "Fahrenheit 9/11." There's also not as much Moore-like speculation or provocatively pitched juxtapositions. This film lets the evidence speak for itself, augmented by talking-heads interviews with insiders who reveal what was going on at the time. Sometimes the lines sound too good to be true, as if the interviews themselves were rehearsed, but that's not something Gibney addresses in his commentary, so we'll never know. Regardless, the evidence is damning enough, as you well know now, with Enron president Jeffrey Skilling serving time in prison and Lay dying before he could join him.
Watching it now, after the trial and all of the other business-related scandals in today's headlines, I thought that I would find myself as tired of it all as Watergate a year after the break-in. But you know what? It's still fascinating, which speaks volumes about the way that this Oscar-nominated documentary was crafted.
The seventh largest corporation in the U.S. with a CEO who made more than 300 million dollars per year collapsed because of "mark-to-market" fraudulent accounting and "pump and drop" practices--with executives driving up the company's stock prices and then selling off all of their own personal shares. That left 20,000 employees without jobs. Worse, the two million dollars in the employee pension fund also vanished.
It's hard not to think of this as political when we're shown clips of Dubyah making calls on Ken Lay's behalf or appearing with dad on an intimate video greeting saying how much Enron has meant to the Bush family (and vice versa). But to Gibney's credit, he doesn't go down that road. The Bush family is not his target. It's the Smartest Guys in the Room, and their way of working was as Wild West as Texas. It was a macho culture that they created, with dangerous company trips and an odd, cutthroat practice of having the employees vote to eliminate 15 percent of low-producing employees every year. It was a culture of risk-taking, with loose cannons rewarded rather than cautioned. o-authors Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean appear in a number of clips to talk about their research, but the fact that Gibney was able to get so many insider video clips after the shredding of evidence began is nothing short of astounding. Though we know what happened and know the outcome, the information is presented within a narrative structure that sustains our interest, while the details of the collapse (and fraud) are so incredible that it seems straight out of Ripley's. Maybe that's why "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is still an effective documentary to watch.
No comments:
Post a Comment