Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (American Documentary) Directed by: Alex Gibney

Most citizens in the United States are aware that they’re not being told everything that is happening in the world around them, or that they’re certainly not being dealt fairly with. Anyone who saw “The Corporation” at last year’s Sundance Film Festival knows that. At the 2005 Festival, however, audiences were given a taste of yet another beleaguering lecture on the evils of capitalism. “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” however, is more than just your typical documentary. When the scandal broke in the late 90’s, it confused everyone as much as it shocked them. What was Enron? Why did they go bankrupt, and what was so terrible about it? For anyone who’s never completely understood the scandal, or the sinister, evil nature of the big-wigs who ran Enron, finally, this is a documentary to answer all of those questions. Fulfilling the first and most primary target goal of a documentary--to inform--”Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is structured in a “backwards/forwards” fashion, while intercutting the personalized stories of people directly affected by the scandal, as well as having presented the material in an entertaining way to not only answer all questions adequately, but to keep one from falling asleep too.

The structure of “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” is what first and foremost serves its purpose of informing by first hooking the audience, and keeping them interested the entire time. The documentary starts off with the suicide of Cliff Baker, an executive of Enron who took his own life shortly after the company’s bankruptcy to avoid jail time and humiliation of his family. As sad as the even is, the demise at one’s own hands was certainly enough to capture attention at what could have possibly been so horrible to kill oneself. From there, the film spirals backwards to the founding of Enron, the cutthroat executives and stock traders involved, and how dearly stoic they were in the face of others, concerned only for themselves.

Also cut into the structure are the stories of a mere few out of the hundreds of thousands of people who lost their jobs with Enron, and subsequently, their entire retirements and livelihoods. We’re introduced to one man who works for a power company that merged within Enron shortly before the collapse that had only several thousand dollars left in his retirement after being encouraged to invest his 401K into Enron stock, while executives were pulling out of the “Titanic” that Enron is frequently compared to in the film.

A great thing about “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” in particular is that the documentary is presented in an exemplary and entertaining fashion--a trend of most Sundance documentaries in order to hold an audience for an extended period of time. “Enron” is full of bars and charts, comic illustrations, as well as comedic one-liners of people both poking fun at the Enron corporation, as well as the sadistic comments made by executives and traders for the company about “Grandma footing the bill” for expenses that Enron itself couldn’t really pay, and were, in fact, paying money out to themselves from non-existent money--merely “projected earnings” rather than cold, hard cash. If anything, it is the coldness with which one is allowed to perceive the people at the top of Enron’s corporate ladder that holds attention because of their blatant disregard for the value of human lives other than their own.

While there are many people out there skilled in the ways of money-making and understanding financial affairs, a good amount of US citizens find their talents elsewhere, and both numbers and dollar signs come across as intimidating and confusing. For those who feel this way, and found themselves grappling to understand the devastating consequences that arose out of the enigmatic crash of Enron in the early 90’s--finally, the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” named after the business executives at the company who were supposedly so, the significance of the Enron bankruptcy is finally explains in sizeable chunks for the consumption and comprehension of the everyman. This documentary succeeds in that it serves the purpose of the documentary to be informative, but succeeds at being so because of its wonderfully structured “plot,” along with the fact that is put together in such an entertaining and compelling fashion, that it would be hard to lose interest in something much bigger than anyone could have ever imagined.