"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"

Then Lay and Skilling found a valuable foil in Andrew Fastow, a manifestly shifty young man who became Enron's chief financial officer and, at the same time, the head of two different private-equity funds set up to do business with Enron (and, essentially, to cast an even darker shadow across Enron's already murky financial condition). Fastow seemed to have no scruples about manifestly unethical and indeed illegal behavior, and he also made a useful fall guy when the high-flying company began to come undone in 2001.

Lay, Skilling and Fastow were intelligent, arrogant and to some degree self-deluded, and like Mao or Stalin they were not completely able to control what they had unleashed. The most electrifying moments in "Enron" lie in the audio and video recordings Gibney has dug up, in some cases from court records and in others from confidential sources. We see Skilling participating in a self-mocking company skit about his big new idea, an accounting standard based on the hypothetical future value of nonexistent transactions. (In fact, this was exactly what he and Fastow were doing to generate Enron's purported profits.)

We hear telephone calls among Enron's young macho cadre of electricity traders -- Skilling's Red Guard, if you will -- as they manipulate the bewildering rules of the California energy market, drive the price of power to astronomical levels, and create the phony rolling blackouts of early 2001. One observes, with frat-boy mock-compassion, that they are turning out the lights on "Grandma Millie" and then sticking the high prices "right up her ass." Another says, "There's plenty of power available -- for the right fuckin' price." One hopes that the Golden State will simply break loose and drift out to sea: "Let 'em use candles."

Gibney's point, in large part, is that the ideology Skilling believed in so fervently -- basically, that deregulated markets and intelligent corporate self-interest would lead to bigger profits and a more efficient energy system for all -- was dangerously misguided. (It's not clear that Ken Lay ever believed in anything, except that making a lot of money was an excellent thing.) Enron's California "experiment" was nothing short of a rape-and-pillage operation, and the Enron story in total suggests that greed makes businesspeople do evil and stupid things, and trumps any long-term rational view. Lay, Skilling, Fastow and other top Enron executives walked away from the collapse with more than $1 billion, while ordinary employees, retirees and shareholders lost virtually everything. (Fastow has forfeited almost $30 million of his rake-off, and faces a 10-year prison sentence. He will testify against Lay and Skilling when their criminal trials begin next January.)

This is a very important argument -- it's essentially the same argument raised by "The Corporation," which is why I raised that film earlier -- and one that needs to be raised in a culture as drenched in the core values of capitalism as ours is. Enron was far from a fluke, or a rogue operation; it was late-'90s American business at its finest, embraced by almost every leading financial analyst and commentator. If it looks in the rear-view mirror like a wacko cult run by thieves, liars and maniacs, what does that tell us about the functioning of the so-called free market (which was trading Enron at $90 a share as late as August 2000)?

Those who see Gibney's "Enron" may well find themselves convinced, but as I said earlier, they're the least likely to need convincing. Understandably, Gibney wants his movie to have some entertainment value, and not to look like a segment of "60 Minutes" or Bill Moyers' "Now" -- so he relies on the kinds of cheesy visual tricks that make it look like a segment of "Unsolved Mysteries" instead. Fuzzy-faced actors "reenact" key scenes from the story; major deals are signified by burlap sacks marked with dollar signs, or unintelligible screens of fake stock-market data. When we hear about Skilling's self-reinvention as a macho motorcycle type, we see unrelated videotape of a motocross race (he was never involved in any such thing).

The effect of such quasi-fictional techniques, I suspect, is subtle but highly unfortunate; it injects the whole enterprise with what you might call epistemological bogosity. I don't envy a filmmaker like Gibney the choice between looking boring and looking phony, between attracting only the earnest PBS audience and creeping toward the realm of tabloid TV. Speaking personally, I believe that everything in "Enron" is true and rigorously sourced, and that the story of Enron is just the story of American capitalism in its most dramatic form. I also believe that subject matter this important deserves more honest, more direct and simpler treatment. Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?

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