"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" directed by Alex Gibney takes a moment to explain in vivid detail about the rise and the fall of that giant of giants, Enron. Based on the book by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin, this documentary holds the viewer glued to the seat because one cannot believe, for a moment, what one is watching on the screen.
The great debacle of the beginning of the century was the Enron downfall. At the same time, it is a cautionary tale for a lot of people about the way some unscrupulous manipulators can wreck havoc in the lives of the people that give their lives working for a any corporation. The Enron workers paid the ultimate price because a few people at the top had an unstoppable greed.
Mr. Gibney is smart in presenting the facts without taking sides. The director is not making a moral judgment at all, he is just letting us absorb how Enron operated and how it was able to pull the wool over everyone's eyes in believing this was the greatest company in the world.
Not only did Enron go down, but it took the Arthur Anderson accounting firm as well. There are thousands of people that are victims of this reckless disregard for the people under these scheming executives, who thought of nothing, but themselves. It's ironic that Jeff Skilling is paying more than twenty million dollars for his own defense, and who knows how much more will Kenneth Lay and Andy Fastow pay to star lawyers in their legal processes.
Ultimately, the real winner seems to be the oriental executive, whose name I don't recall, with an appetite for strippers who ended up being the biggest landowner in Colorado and now is living happily ever after in Hawaii. Compare that picture with the people the Enron workers who lost it all and must now make ends meet with little.
The Enron tragedy should be taught at Harvard as Greed 101, or how to get away with murder in America.