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Directed by: Alex Gibney Starring: Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind, The Usual Suspects I just saw this movie yesterday and I was remarkably surprised at how much I loved it. This is a great documentary in the true style of what a documentary is supposed to be. It is very engrossing and entertaining without resorting to being stupid, grandstanding, and pathetic like a lot of modern documentaries in the Michael Moore mold. I should preface this by saying that I was working in the Houston office of McKinsey & Company during the Enron scandal. For those of you who don't know, McKinsey & Company was the strategic consulting firm that helped pioneer the energy trading business that Enron created. Jeff Skilling was a partner in the Texas office of McKinsey when he came up with the idea for Gas Bank. I personally knew a lot of people who had worked to develop Enron Broadband and a number of other business ideas. Enron was, in many ways, McKinsey's poster child, especially the Houston office where two of the directors based their platform on the company. Given how much I know about the scandal, I was very skeptical about the movie whether it was going to dumb down and sensationalize what was a very complex accounting scandal and human drama. What happened at Enron was extreemly complex and most people I meet have absolutely no idea what realy happened and just say "Oh, they we're a bunch of crooks who stole all this money." What The Smartest Guys in the Room succeeds in doing so brilliantly is laying out exactly how it happened, in the numbers manipulation and the hubris that pushed one of the most inventive companies into oblivion. It places the blame on all of the culpable players, from Fastow and Skilling to the hordes of brokers and stock analysts who failed to do their job. I personally remember people at McKinsey talking about Enron before the fall and how convoluted and non-sensical their annual reports were. It's not like no-one knew what was going on, they just turned a blind eye, and The Smartest Guys in the Room goes to great lengths to make that clear. The movie does sometimes fail in a couple of respects. One, the movie borders on sensationalism at a couple of points, noteably the re-staging of the suicide of Cliff Baxter. It's almost made worse because when the sensationalist crap happens it's so incogrous to the rest of the movie. The second is kind of a personal nit pick, but I'm just going to have to live with it. For some reason, the film makers have a burning desire to minse politics with the film, I guess because it makes good PR. They squarely blame Enron for the California Energy crisis and somehow pin the recall of Governor Gray Davis on Enron and imply that Bush might have engineered the whole thing to get rid of a potential political contender. First of all, I lived in California just after that from 2002-3003 and Gray Davis is an idiot. If people thought John Kerry was a no-nothing candidate who couldn't inspire anyone to take down George W., they should thank their lucky stars the Dems didn't nominate Gray Davis. Secondly, Enron exacerbated the California power crisis, but they didn't cause it. PG&E, Sempra, and the other California power companies did when they assigned the terms for deregulation and kept retail prices regulated while floating wholesale prices. If not for the combination of unusually cold winter, hot summer, low hydro power, and high natural gas prices, the energy crisis probably wouln't have happened in the first place. Sadly, most people simply don't bother to understand the simple economics of the situation. But since the whole world thinks that Enron caused the crisis, I guess it'll have to stand. Anyhow, to wrap up, great, great documentary. RATING: 4.5 PROS: Remarkably smart, compassionate, and accurate account of the fall of Enron CONS: A little over the top and overly political at times. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413845/ WildGunman fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Jun 28, 2005 |
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Jun 28, 2005 21:57
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http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1558181
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Jun 28, 2005 22:35
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