ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM
Director: Alex Gibney
Genre: Documentary
Year: 2005

Reviewed by Vance Aandahl
Watson Scale Rating (0 being worst and 6 being perfect): 4.5

These days there’s no middle ground. Take corporations, for example. The public’s opinion of big corporations has become a major battlefront, and it’s not considered permissible to have a balanced or moderate position on this issue. I lament the extreme polarization of our nation’s political climate, the abandonment of reasoned discourse, and the cheap tactic of resorting to inflammatory language. Let’s face it – there’s a genuine civil war now raging between a rowdy mob of godless, anarchist, commie-kissing, America-hating, elitist, girly-man liberals and the tightly ranked legions of the Bible-beating, plutocratic, theocratic, oligarchic, empire-building, torture-loving, blatantly dishonest, greedy-pig neocons. So it’s not surprising that corporations are depicted by some filmmakers as malevolent predators and by others as fountainheads of prosperity and happiness. Let us look at a few examples.

Brought to the big screen by Chris Wedge and the Blue Sky gang, whose previous release, ICE AGE, was also a big hit, the hugely popular ROBOTS is a one-joke show. Look, Mommy! Robots have coffee shops just like we do, only they drink cups of oil instead of coffee! Ha ha ha! Look, Daddy! After they go to bed, robots have farting contests just like we do! Ha ha ha! Look, Grandma! The Robin-Williams robot is swinging around a lamppost and singing “Singin' in the Oil” just like Gene Kelly! Ha ha ha! And so on. The repetition of this robots-are-just-like-people joke in a thousand slightly different subvariations has an effect that numbs the brain, and so does the frenetic breakneck pace of the action, but pay careful attention and you’ll notice that beneath the film’s jaunty surface there is a subtext designed to influence our opinion of corporations.  

In the very center of Robot City a huge building rises high above everything else – the corporate headquarters of Mr. Bigweld (voiced by Mel Brooks), an eccentric and generous inventor whose company puts social responsibility above profits. Mr. Bigweld works hard to provide the robot civilization with a cornucopia of wonderful products, products that guarantee every individual robot his fair share of happiness, security, and wellbeing – including the replacement parts rickety old robots need to keep on truckin’. But when the benevolent Mr. Bigwell retires to play with a roomful of dominos, the unspeakably evil Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) and his mother Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent) take over the corporation. These villains decide to throw social responsibility out the window and jack up profits by producing nothing but ultra-expensive products for upper-class and upper-middle-class robot consumers. Under this new policy, none of the working-class robots will be able to afford replacement parts.  Now, when the older working-class robots malfunction, instead of being repaired, they’ll be picked up by collection trucks and taken to a huge furnace to be melted down into metal ingots. Yikes! Fortunately, Ratchet and Madame Gasket are foiled.  Led by a young dreamer named Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor), the working-class robots rise up in a heroic Star-Wars-style rebellion and defeat the evildoers. At the end of the movie, the normal state of affairs is restored. The Bigweld Company is back in good hands, and all is bliss and fulfillment in the consumeristic paradise of the robots.     

THE EVIL RATCHET from ROBOTS

We get a different view of corporations in THE CORPORATION, a documentary by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott that came and went rather quickly in the summer of 2004, probably because it was overshadowed by the release of Michael Moore’s FAHRENHEIT 9/11. (If you missed THE CORPORATION and want to see it, the DVD has just been released.)  Joel Bakan wrote the film, basing it on his book “The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power.” Bakan’s thesis goes something like this. The bizarre history of the laws concerning corporations has resulted in each and every corporation having the rights of an individual person but also being required (by its obligation to maximize profits for its shareholders) to behave in ways that society does not approve of in individual persons. Indeed, Bakan employs the World Health Organization Manual of Mental Disorders to show that corporations in their behavior meet the definition of a criminal psychopath point for point.

For 145 minutes over 40 commentators including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Nobel-prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, and numerous distinguished academics offer arguments and specific evidence to convince us this thesis is true. They contend that corporations create vast amounts of pollution and exploit workers in third-world countries while draining those countries of their resources, that corporations make deals with some countries that are known enemies of the U.S. and use their financial power to perpetuate brutal and corrupt regimes in other countries, that corporations not only violate basic human rights and cause enormous suffering around the world, they also manipulate consumers in the U.S. with devious advertising and endanger their health with unsafe products. After you learn about the udder infections and massive discharges of pus caused by Monsanto’s bovine growth hormones, you may never drink milk again.

THE MAKERS OF THE CORPORATION (Achbar, Bakan, and Abbott)

To show us an exception to the rule, Achbar and Abbott interview a corporate leader who actually resembles Mr. Bigweld. Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, has devoted himself to proving that a big company can be environmentally and socially conscientious and still make a reasonable profit for its shareholders. Anderson himself acknowledges that this will be difficult to prove.  Despite his best efforts, Interface still takes more from the world than it gives, and in Anderson's estimation the company will not achieve a balance in that regard until 2025, if then. It’s a tough task. Corporations, in Bakan’s view, are designed to take, not to give, to be voracious, not altruistic.

We get yet another view from Alex Gibney in ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM. Like Achbar and Abbott, Gibney has based his documentary on a book, “The Smartest Guys in the Room” by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who provide lucid and insightful commentary throughout the film. Gibney, who previously directed THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER, has won my admiration by explaining the Enron scandal in a careful, step-by-step fashion that makes everything reasonably clear, even for a dolt who knows next to nothing about economics and the complex shark-tank world of financial investment and who therefore closed-mindedly chose not to read about the collapse of Enron when it was being covered in the newspapers and the news magazines. I learned a lot in just 101 minutes. I learned that Enron was born about fifteen years ago when energy deregulation made possible “a new business model” based solely on trading different types of energy. With the advent of mark-to-market accounting, it was possible for Enron to claim profits it had yet to earn.  While in reality the officers of the company were taking insane risks and making bad deals that plunged it deeper and deeper into debt, they were able, through audacious and deceptive bookkeeping practices, to show huge profits on paper. CEO Kenneth Lay pumped up Enron workers and Enron shareholders with his energetic speeches, assuring them that profits were skyrocketing and Enron would soon be the largest company in America. Enron’s smoke-and-mirrors show fooled everybody – not just the people who invested in Enron stock but also the other companies dealing in energy, some of America’s top banks and brokerage firms (e.g., J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch, CitiBank), government investigators, and even the Supreme Pontiff of Moolah, Alan Greenspan himself. Near the end, Enron was America’s seventh largest company, with an estimated value of $70 billion. Finally the house of cards began to collapse. Top executives sold their stock and fled with hundreds of millions of dollars. Enron workers lost their jobs and their pensions, and Enron shareholders lost their entire investment. Since the collapse, several of the big dogs at Enron have been sentenced to prison or have committed suicide, but the biggest dogs of all, CEO Lay and President Jeffrey Skilling, continue to proclaim their innocence. They don’t go to trial until next January. 

ENRON DIRECTOR, ALEX GIBNEY

Lay and Skilling are probably none too pleased with Gibney’s film. Gibney is a diligent muckraker, and with the help of some previously silent Enron employees, he dredged up new slime and now has presented it here, on the silver screen, for the very first time.  Specifically, we get to see a number of secret Enron videotapes, including one in which the top executives of the company perform a satirical skit spoofing their own insatiable greed. This is a truly memorable moment. Also memorable are shots of Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger shmoozing with their good buddy Lay, whom they refer to as Kenny Boy, a shot of Alan Greenspan grinning like a fool as Lay presents him with something called the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service, and the before-and-after shots of Skilling, who worked hard to transform himself from a nerd into a rugged, macho, dirt-bike-riding outdoorsman, partly to gratify his own ego, but also to inspire confidence in investors with his tough, manly persona. And we get to hear audio tapes of phone conversations between Enron traders gleefully cackling over the gobs of money they’re making as they take advantage of the California energy crisis during the rolling blackouts of 2001. As the camera shows us a row of houses being engulfed in flames by a devastating wildfire, we hear the voice of a trader crying exultantly, “Burn, baby, burn!”   

ENRON’S JEFF SKILLING

How should we react when some juvenile 25-year-old shouts “Burn, baby, burn!” as someone else’s tragedy turns him into a millionaire?  The tone of the movie is mixed. The commentary tells us we should feel anger and outrage, but at the same time Gibney employs a variety of witty ironical devices to make us chuckle instead. For example, he introduces each episode in the history of Enron with a title card similar to the ones used in silent movies, and the titles themselves are humorously sarcastic, just like the title of the whole film. Similarly, a feeling of sarcastic merriment is conveyed by the perky, chipper musical soundtrack that accompanies scenes of fraud and deceit. After shuffling out of the lobby of the Mayan into the chill night air of Denver in early May, Frosty and I compared notes and agreed that these witty devices seemed a bit too contrived, a bit too cute for our liking. But that’s just a quibble. At the same time we were babbling with excitement over the quality of the acting. 

“Ken Lay should get the Oscar for best actor!” I exclaimed. “What a performance! The heartfelt sincerity he projected when he was giving his employees those optimistic pep talks is so convincing on the big screen that it must be making Brando and Olivier shudder with envy in their graves!”

ENRON’S KENNETH LAY

“You’re right!” cried Frosty, her eyes glowing with the rapture of catharsis. “And that stud muffin Jeff Skilling should get the Oscar for best supporting actor! What a man!”

THE CORPORATION persuades us to believe that it is normal and ordinary for the officers of corporations to pillage and plunder the rest of the planet in order to “earn” obscene amounts of money for themselves and for their shareholders. ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM complements this message by showing that occasionally the officers of a corporation will become so inflated with hubris that they turn their gaze inward, focus their greed on the bank accounts of their investors, and cannibalistically devour their own company. It’s interesting to note how the American public reacts in two different ways to these two scenarios. Nearly everyone thinks it’s perfectly okay that corporations prey on the working class people of other countries and pollute their environment, but when a corporation preys on America herself, then we wail and pull out our hair and rend our garments and bemoan the moral monstrousness of it all.