Texas Justice

Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling stands tall outside Enron headquarters, from Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Bethany McLean is a young Fortune reporter who, almost accidentally, set the wheels in motion that brought about one of the biggest bankruptcies in American history. Being interviewed for the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room — based on a book she co-authored with Peter Elkind — McLean reflects in an incongruously mousy voice (she looks all of 17) that the fall of the multi-billion dollar corporation isn’t about numbers: “It’s a human tragedy.”

Tragedy seems like the right word for the thousands of Enron employees who lost their jobs and life savings, or the investors whose portfolios took a smash when the law finally cottoned on to the corrupt accounting that falsely inflated Enron’s stock throughout the '90s. But Aristotle didn’t want his tragic figures to be totally unsympathetic; he was interested in the human flaw that would trigger our pity. He wanted us to see ourselves in the fallen.

And yet, unless you have a small “666” burned onto your skull, you will not recognize yourself in the epic slime-ball behaviour of Enron executives Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow. The three little pigs at the trough and their top-tier colleagues made sure to cash out millions of their own stock while the company scurried to hide the debilitating $30 billion US debt they’d created. These guys are too inhuman for tragedy.

Beyond pointing out that Skilling was a nerd with a good makeover team — he got buffer the more money he earned, pumping up and having his eyes lasered — director Alex Gibney (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) doesn’t really try to humanize the men at the helm of the Enron scandal. They are old-fashioned villains, as scary and more arrogant than anything in Sin City. Gibney’s fast, angry little movie makes rock 'n' roll out of corporate bafflegab, providing a lucid explanation for how a Houston gas pipeline company rode a wave of deregulation and privatization to disaster, cheered on by some recognizable powerhouses, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Bush family (Dubya calls Lay “Kenny Boy”).

Director Alex Gibney. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir recently wrote an article about the rise of “agitprop” docs, lumping Enron in with The Corporation and Fahrenheit 9/11, calling them “the left wing's answer to talk radio. Like [conservative pundits] Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, these kinds of movies — which mostly play in art-house theaters in major cities and college towns — reach an audience almost exclusively composed of like-minded people.”

But Enron doesn’t quite fit the agitprop bill. What separates this doc from its more muckraking brethren is that almost everyone is like-minded when it comes to Enron. It would be hard to find a defender of the company’s practices on either the right or the left, though Lay and Skilling themselves try, to farcical effect. At one point, Lay complains to his devastated staff that hey, he and his wife also lost a lot, having gone from being worth hundreds of millions to just a few million!

A non-partisan consensus has been reached about Enron that could never be reached about “agitprop” subjects like Iraq or the Bush administration: Enron was bad. Really, really bad, and Gibney shows us why. He is a synthesizer, sifting through the tons of paper generated by the endless Department of Justice investigation into the company’s wrongdoings. (Fastow has been convicted, while Lay and Skilling await trial.)

Lay proves a frustratingly elusive figure, but Jeff Skilling — ferret-faced and bloated with confidence — is the film’s star. In jaw-dropping footage taken at rah-rah general meetings during Enron’s rise, Skilling trumpets the greed-is-good impulse of the free market with the conviction of a Maoist or a fundamentalist Christian. One of his first moves at Enron was to implement regular purges, firing 15 per cent of the workforce on the basis of peer reviews. Getting minions to do the dirty work is ingenious, as all megalomaniac dictators know, helping to create a hermetically sealed culture where everyone feels invested, and no one questions anything, especially unreasonable profits. (Gibney takes delight in the irony of Enron’s commercial slogan: “Ask why.”)

And the profits were huge, thanks to Skilling’s creative bookkeeping. He invented something called “mark-to-market” accounting — essentially reporting potential profits as real profits, thereby falsely upping the stock’s value. Meanwhile, Fastow was laundering money and Lay smiled from on high. Even while the executives were watching the enterprise crash — and, amazingly, the Houston headquarters really did resemble a spaceship — they encouraged staffers to keep investing all their retirement money in Enron. When Bethany McLean wrote a rather innocent piece in 2001 for Fortune entitled “Is Enron Overpriced?” the company panicked, sending executives to the Fortune offices to bully her. It was the beginning of the end.

Footage of former Enron CFO Andy Fastow that appears in the film. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

Gibney couldn’t get original interviews with the big cheeses, but the archival footage he does find is revealing enough. At congressional hearings, Skilling protects his posterior with dead-eyed righteousness. Whenever he does look contrite, one has the uncomfortable sensation that he’s suppressing a smirk.

Formally, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room suffers from Moore-ish cuteness. Gibney relies on overly clever music cues and makes a major misjudgment in recreating the suicide of one implicated manager; it looks silly rather than terrible. Worse, Gibney repeatedly uses stock footage of skydivers to illustrate the company’s high-risk, gambling-addict mentality. Fine, but one Icarus image per movie should suffice — these guys are dropping every few minutes.

All is forgiven when Gibney digs up previously unheard tapes of Enron’s brokers laughing on the telephone as they manufacture the California energy crisis to drive up energy prices that will benefit Enron. “Let ’em use candles,” huffs one cowboy. “Burn, baby, burn!” says another as the wildfires take hold. In these moments of casual mercenary conversation, we get an answer to “ask why”: Enron did it because they could, and because the kinds of outrageous profits demanded in that not-so-long-ago bullish era could only be sustained by such ugliness.

Any sweet taste of justice squeezed from the fact that these guys got caught doesn’t linger. At the time, Enron was the biggest bankruptcy in corporate history; now, that honour goes to Worldcom. Who’s next? Let’s hope Gibney is recharging his camera.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room opens in Vancouver and Toronto April 29.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.