A documentary about the Enron
corporation, its faulty and corrupt business practices, and how they led to its
fall. Alex Gibney, who wrote and
produced Eugene Jarecki's The Trials of Henry Kissinger, examines the rise and
fall of an infamous corporate juggernaut in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the
Room, which he wrote and directed. The film, based on the book by Fortune
Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, opens with a reenactment of
the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter, then travels back in time,
describing Enron chairman Kenneth Lay's humble beginnings as the son of a
preacher, his ascent in the corporate world as an "apostle of
deregulation," his fortuitous friendship with the Bush family, and the
development of his business strategies in natural gas futures. The film points
out that the culture of financial malfeasance at Enron was evident as far back
as 1987, when Lay apparently encouraged the outrageous risk taking and profit
skimming of two oil traders in Enron's Valhalla office because they were
bringing a lot of money into the company. But it wasn't until eventual CEO Jeff
Skilling arrived at Enron that the company's "aggressive accounting"
philosophy truly took hold. The Smartest Guys in the Room explores the lengths
to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable. Their
win-at-all-costs strategy included suborning financial analysts with huge
contracts for their firms, hiding debts by essentially having the company loan
money to itself, and using California's deregulation of the electricity market
to manipulate the state's energy supply. Gibney's film reveals how Lay,
Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of
lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and
their retirement funds. The filmmaker posits the Enron scandal not as an
anomaly, but as a natural outgrowth of free-market capitalism. ~ Josh Ralske,
Rovi
Rating: 97%
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/enron_the_smartest_guys_in_the_room/
Rating: 7.7/10 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016268/?ref_=tt_rec_tt
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