The smartest guys in the room movie
The success of the stock acts as the proof of the company’s glory, which then fuels the stock - a cycle of illusion destined to unravel. The income statement therefore becomes a fiction, one that exists to keep the stock price high. In a single stroke, Skilling, who resembles an angry Peter Jennings with a touch of a Charles Grodin weasel, appears to make it possible for Enron to declare its profit to be whatever the company wants it to be. The film invites us to zero in, for instance, on the moment that Enron seems to take the leap from routine go-go bravado to a fearless new dimension of financial insanity: It’s when Jeffrey Skilling, the company’s CEO, pushes ”mark-to-market” accounting - thus booking potential future profits as if they’d already been realized. (For more on the film, see /issues/dispatch//screens_feature.html for an interview with the director.The cure for that malaise is Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, a deeply straightforward yet beautifully crafted documentary (it’s like a great Frontline episode with hipper music) that turns the vortex inside out, and does it with a thrilling moral clarity.
#The smartest guys in the room movie movie#
Fantasy" with the introduction of Andy Fastow is the same sensibility that closes the movie with Tom Waits’ fabulous rendition of "God’s Away on Business." (The film's music choices show great forethought.) Despite these biases, the movie helps the average American understand the nature of the shell games perpetuated by Enron and how "synergistic corruptions" can corrupt absolutely. But the sensibility that manipulatively matches the Traffic tune "Dear Mr. In the course of showing these scoundrels for their true measure, Gibney strikes a few unfair blows that make it clear that the filmmaker’s stance is not fully objective, and that should not be forgotten either while watching his film. Gibney makes great use of lots of inside material: training films, news footage, party spoofs, and some especially damning audiotapes of Enron traders callously manipulating the price of oil on the West Coast as California suffered the consequences with rolling blackouts. The emphasis is on human drama, from suicide to 20,000 people sacked: the personalities of Ken Lay (with Falwellesque rectitude), Jeff Skilling (he of big ideas), Lou Pai (gone with 250 M), and Andy Fastow (the dark prince) dominate. With such characters as Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and Andy Fastow at the helm of Enron, the "great man" approach is irresistibly tempting, since their "sins" are so lurid and grandiose. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room Synopsis: Enron dives from the seventh largest US company to bankruptcy in less than a year in this tale told chronologically. Bush’s re-election campaign and the tacit complicity of banks, accountants, stock analysts, and others in willfully turning a blind eye to irregularities that might have pointed out that the emperor was wearing no clothes. The film teeters between two narrative strategies: Enron’s undoing seen as the work of some bad apples who tainted the whole bushel and the story of Enron as an American saga – a story not only of rampant hubris and self-interest at the local level but also a story about the operational mentality of the largest corporate contributor to George W.
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Moreover, the film doesn’t require an economics degree to understand the factors that led to Enron’s demise, although laymen may occasionally wish for a pause button in the theatre in order to absorb the volumes of information in more manageable scoops. Based on the book by Fortune writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room documents the collapse in vivid detail and with cinematic flourish. It’s a truism that things are done big in Texas, but who knew that approach applied to failures as well successes? The Enron debacle – the bankruptcy scandal that demolished the Houston corporation that was ranked the seventh largest in the country, and also devastated its swindled employees, stockholders, business associates, and even casual observers – is put under the microscope in Gibney’s documentary.