Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2675 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-10
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.77:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 110 minutes

Synopsis
This searing examination of the Enron accounting scandal reveals the psychology of greed and corporate corruption that facilitated the company's rise to power and also its fall. When Enron went bankrupt in 2001, the principals walked away millionaires--but later faced legal proceedings and jail sentences. Meanwhile, many employees and investors were left with nothing, not even their retirement savings. Shedding light on the new economy of the 1990s when predictions and book-cooking flourished without actual profits, the film shows how it was not Enron alone but a network of bankers, traders, and accountants who turned a blind eye to the company's clearly suspicious numbers. CEO Ken Lay and top dogs Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow give candid interviews that illustrate their skill at deflecting hard questions and egotistically boasting about the company's success. In one of the company's cold and calculated moves--which caused the California power outages, and lead to the ousting of governor Gray Davis--Enron employees are shown laughing at forest fires. Footage of employees reveals greed, lust for risk-taking, and cheating, all while thinking they could never be caught. Finally, a few brave whistle-blowers stepped forward, including Bethany McLean, author of the Enron novel upon which this film is based, who wrote an article in Fortune magazine calling the company's bluff. A remarkable documentary which packages the events of the scandal into a cohesive story.

Customer Reviews

Smarting
It was never going to get a fair hearing. If there was any defence in one of the most nauseating cases of corporate pillaging, self-aggrandisement and greed it was not going to be seen in this film, shown in Brixton's Ritzy Cinema. The chalk board on the door to the screen set the scene.

What emerges is a staggering story of a corporation romping over the established rules and procedures, riding the bull market to new highs and only crashing down when the people saw that the

The truly tragic thing is not the tales of the various executives, marketing men and lawyers. Some of them lost their jobs, but soon found others. The criminals went to jail, and had their ill-gotten gains confiscated. But the real victims were only fleetingly shown. This was a sole complaint in the otherwise masterly editing of this film. A thorough investigation in to the losses borne by the pensioners and pension holders would have presented a truly staggering contrast to the corporate greed on clear display.

What does emerge is a smattering of personal stories which gives some idea of the extent of the damage done. Private pensions shrunk from £350,000 to $1,500. And with it the dreams of a comfortable retirement destroyed. These were the ordinary people, long-term employees with rock solid utility companies who had invested everything with their new parent company, Enron. With promises of riches for all, they funded the bloated, wallowing greed, and they paid the ultimate price for its inevitable failure.

The sickest guys in the room
Bethany McLean, who along with Peter Elkind, wrote the book from which this documentary was adapted, is clearly satisfied with herself as she sits on a couch relating what she knows about the fall of Enron. And she should be. She was the one who first really pursued the question, "How does Enron make money?" What she didn't know when she first asked the question is that they make money the old-fashioned way, they steal it.

What I was most forcibly struck with while watching this fascinating story is how much all the posturing and lying and misrepresenting of the talking heads, Jeff Skilling, Kenneth Lay, et al., reminded me of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., in the White House. The key similarity is the use of their power over the media and in front of a podium to mislead the minions and the public to their advantage. Without the ability to lie to large numbers of people at the same time, and to stifle and belittle contrary voices, they would not have succeeded.

But also there is the complacency and the complicity of not just the greedy stockholders and the adoring employees, but the greater public who failed to ask not "why?" but "how?" In the case of Enron, how can a company exceed not only all expectations, but something like the law of financial gravity? If it looks too good to be true and nobody can give you a clear answer to how it's done--guess what? It is too good to be true. It may seem a stretch, but the same kind of mentality continues to persuade Nigerian scammers and "Congratulations: You've Won!!!" emailers that there are still fat bank accounts in America just waiting to be emptied. Nobody wanted to look too closely because nobody wanted to prick a bubble. Instead everybody wanted to believe that things that go up never have to come down (at least not now), and that the smartest guys in the room really were, and thanks to them we are all going to get rich, or at least we can applaud and admire from the sidelines.

Another failure is that of not looking critically at the cultural climate and the mentality of the traders and their bosses, whose morality (in the form of emails and public pronouncements) was that of people who would cheat their best friend, who would steal from widows and orphans (no exaggeration: they did) and laugh about it.

And the bankers and the brokerage firms, the federal watch dogs and the Congress--where were they? Lapping it up like lap dogs, getting paid off or having their campaigns funded by the robber barons at Enron. Greed is good! It's the American way! Deregulate everything! The police force, the army; and free enterprise and the magical, invisible hand of the marketplace will bring us unprecedented and unparalleled riches. Burp!

No, the honchos at Enron were not the smartest guys in the room. They were the sickest. Smart guys would have made a good living, maybe even enough to buy that house on the hill, a vacation home in some warm clime, while having banked and invested enough to send the kids and grandkids to good schools, and been satisfied. They might even have taken some pride in the work they were doing. But how can you take pride in your work when you are essentially stealing from others, especially when you are stealing from the very people who work for you and trust you? The smartest guys in the room would not have thrown so much time and energy into ripping people off, into gratifying a warped desire to financially lord it over others. They would not be those who cared more about ratcheting up their millions than they did about anything else in life. People who care about winning so massively and so cruelly are not smart. They aren't even well. They are the sickest guys in the room.

Alex Gibney (who also wrote and produced the excellent The Trials of Henry Kissinger 2002) is to be commended for making the kind of documentary that informs, enlightens and appalls. The footage from corporate meetings, press conferences, company skits (oh, what fun they had!) and interviews with the principals and those they ruined make for a most engaging moral lesson. The story unfolds like some kind of pathological tragedy from inside a fascist state or like the neoconned White House where public pronouncements are made with only one goal in mind: deception. What fools these morals be. And the biggest fools are the greediest whose lives are lived in empty pursuit of nothing more than naked power with which they can buy nothing of value that they didn't already have.

A mess and a wasted opportunity, sometimes interesting despite itself...
I really wanted to like this film. With the current credit crisis, I was looking forward on getting an exposé on one of the biggest US corporate scandals. However, I have to say, it's a wasted opportunity with a subject that could have made a GREAT documentary, which this is NOT.

It suffers from the following:

- Too many narrative voices. Didn't the editors ever hear the term 'less is more'? Instead they went for 'more is more' and the result is a mess. Too many opinions and not enough facts. Too many people offering 'cute' statements and metaphors. Because of this you never get a clear analysis of what precisely happened with this company or precisely how it evolved and the culture it emerged from.

- Kitsch use of music and constant cutting from source to source (see above). There is no sense of a narrative arc. Constant recourse to gossip. The film makers also allude to politics but in a superficial partisan fashion. We never get the 'why' question answered.

- As the director says in the extras, he was interested in the film because it was about people. The problem with this is that actually the people aren't very interesting. What is interesting is the ideas and the assumptions people are acting on. Since he knows nothing about the history or politics of these ideas, there is no context for this story to possibly be meaningful. It just becomes about how people make mistakes, are too greedy or commit fraud, when there are wider questions at stake.

- What is really interesting in this film (despite itself) is the conversations between Enron traders, the corporate photos of CEOs, the weird corporate videos, the feeling for life in that office culture, the fact they fired 15% of their work force to keep people on their toes (explaining the extreme risk taking at the heart of the company - a connection they don't actually make incidentally). However, the film makers never make use of this material. The empty desks are never allowed to be poignant, the CEO portraits are never left to be tragic. The material is never allowed to speak for itself. They fluff it.

All in all it's a mess about a mess. I got angry about the film making as much as Enron. If this was in more talented film maker's hands, it could have been an astounding film that could have said a lot about US corporate and financial culture, which seems to be ending right now. A missed opportunity.