Review of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) by Lester Y — 02 Aug 2009

A contemporary crime epic.

Like most great movies (and almost all great documentaries), the film strongly extends to more simple themes, the human experience. Here, issues of morality, ethics, and greed are in the forefront, as it attempts to pry into the heads of Skilling, Lay, Fastow, and all of the other pieces of shit executives and figure out exactly what were they thinking when they knew what they were doing was morally reprehensible.

I always thought the story of Enron would be very difficult to tell in film because of its intricacies and insider geekspeak, but here Alex Gibney (who went on to direct another favorite, Taxi To The Dark Side) does a superb job of not only making sense of it all for the layman to understand, but also providing an enticing visual element (and additionally, tons of incendiary archived and declassified footage) to do this modern tragedy justice. The result is a documentary that's technically dense, emotionally gripping, and brutally intoxicating.