Enron opens in the style of a conspiracy thriller before introducing us to journalist Bethany McLean, whose ‘Fortune’ article was both the first shot across Enron’s bow and solid evidence that led to its collapse.

&0183 &32 A fascinating exploration of corporate culture and epic misdeeds, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room takes viewers from the heyday of soaring Three reasons to watch Enron: The Smartest Guys in the RoomThe shape of things to come. Want to the see the first signpost to the modern age of unfettered greed, look no further than this film. The tenth-anniversary edition of the definitive account of the Enron scandal, updated with a new chapter The Enron scandal brought down one of the most admired companies of the 1990s. Countless books and articles were written about it, but only The Smartest Guys in the Room holds up a decade later as the definitive narrative.Enron established Gibney as a leading documentary filmmaker of his generation.

But it’s the way Gibney reveals these men’s personalities, initially charming before a darker side emerges, that makes the film so compelling.Gibney’s style. From his Oscar-winning account of the US military’s use of illegal coercion methods in Taxi to the Dark Side and further examples of individual exceptionalism in US culture ( Client 9, Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, The Armstrong Lie) to his account of abuse in the Catholic Church ( Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) and exploration of an organisation that enjoys the freedoms of being listed as a religion ( Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief), Alex Gibney has consistently proven himself an adept chronicler of the issues that compound modern life. But even she may not have realised the extent to which the organisation was rigging the ‘game’. Particularly when it emerged that the electricity outages that Californians experienced in 2001 – a major cause of Grey Davis’ losing governorship of the state in 2003 – was being artificially manipulated by Enron employees in order to boost their company’s share price. It wasn’t helped that global accounting firm Arthur Anderson were more than a little relaxed in their practices, a mistake that eventually led to their downfall.Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room Review.

The method allows a company to claim projected earnings from projects once the deal is signed. When Enron was granted permission to use mark-to-market accounting it saw the start of the dramatic increase in its profits and its share price. As a double act, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling are hard to beat.

In fact I did wonder how much this film cost to make because the vast majority of it is stock footage and a handful of interviews. Lesser hands could have fudged the telling but the team here structure it well and use footage from Enron and C-Span to really good effect. With the Enron film it is all the more interesting because it is a prime example of how it all fell down and how easy it is to con the market which, regardless of the legality of the accounting method used, is basically what they did! The film tells the story well and it is a tale that never struggles to fascinate. So I have watched films like this and like The Corporation with interest and appreciate the way that they sell a complex issue in easy to understand ways.

Well worth a look and yet another good documentary making it into cinemas. A cautionary tale that I doubt that those that needed to learn from have learnt from. However it is well structured and easy to follow, stripping away the feared complexity of the tale and telling it in a fascinating and engaging way. Overall this is not a perfect documentary because it is a bit biased and based on commentary from subjects all on one side of the fence. The film also stretches to bring in Bush and his cronies as if they were also to blame it doesn't labour this point but what little it does is stretched again it could have done less and allowed the audience to draw its own conclusions. Sadly it does use this not to the point of distraction but just to the point where I wondered if the makers didn't think that the facts would be strong enough to make the audience get the point without the extra bit of hammering.

Enron The Smartest Guys In The Room