Gibney mostly focuses on the people involved, and he associates the key characters with songs. The two main characters are Chairman of the Board Ken Lay, whose song is Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man," and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling, whose song is Marilyn Manson's version of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)." Another important character is Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow, whose song is Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy." In general, I consider Gibney's use of music to be one of the best things about the movie.
I suppose I should mention that Gibney is the kind of documentarian who juxtaposes images for their emotional impact on the viewer, even when they have little or no logical connection. For example, he intercuts stills of Enron executives on a motorcycle trip with footage from somewhere else of someone else doing dangerous stunt riding. This is Gibney's way of implanting the impression in the viewer's mind that Enron execs were extreme risk-takers.
Although the film centers around the humanistic aspects of the Enron debacle, it does take a brief stab at explaining concepts like mark-to-market accounting and off-balance-sheet debt, but I confess I didn't fully follow that part of it. However, what did come through to me loud and clear was this: as Enron lost money year after year and ran up staggering debt, it issued statements indicating it was in robust financial health. Meanwhile, top executives pocketed millions.
A lot of time is spent in the movie building a case that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling created a corporate culture at Enron that was morally bankrupt. And the film also claims that Enron got help in keeping up the deception that it was in good shape from financial institutions like Merrill Lynch, J. P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup, as well as from accounting firm Arthur Andersen.
If you find the movie worthwhile at all, I highly recommend taking the time to listen to Gibney's feature-length audio commentary on the DVD. There he says, "Enron is definitely not the story of a few bad apples. It's the story of a broader culture of corruption… There's a little bit of Lay, Skilling and Fastow in all of us."
Even as Gibney's moralizing manifests itself in his film, so does his political outlook, and I expect this will annoy some viewers. For example, he shows Ronald Reagan talking about "the magic of the marketplace" and immediately starts playing "That Old Black Magic" on the soundtrack. In his commentary, Gibney states, "I don't think capitalism is bad. I don't think that at all. But I think cutthroat capitalism in which nothing else matters but the pursuit of the almighty dollar—there's something fundamentally wrong with that. There's no such thing as a pure invisible hand."
Gibney based his film on the book "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron" by "Fortune" reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. McLean and Elkind are heard from frequently as talking heads during the documentary. Also, the DVD extras provide seven minutes of conversation with McLean and five minutes with Elkind. In addition, there's a 12-minute featurette taken from a television program, HDNet's "Higher Definition," where host Robert Wilonsky talks with the two reporters separately about Enron. The DVD also contains the text of three "Fortune" magazine articles about Enron written by McLean and Elkind.
Another special feature on the DVD contains footage showing the Firesign Theatre guys doing a radio skit, and I found this absolutely hilarious. In the skit, the guys claim that the Houston Opera had a new version of Wagner's Ring cycle called "The Fall of Enron" in which Skilling, Fastow and Lay played key roles. As the story of the opera is told, the music played in the background is "The Ride of the Valkyries."
On the next page, I've given all the details for the "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" DVD.
