Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
Directed & Written by: Alex Gibney. Produced by: Alex Gibney, Jason Kliot & Susan Motamed. Director of Photography: Maryse Alberti. Edited by: Alison Ellwood. Music by: Matt Hauser. Released by: Magnolia. Country of Origin: USA. 110 min. Not Rated.
Founded in 1985, after the deregulation of the gas industry, the Enron
Energy Corporation was at one time the seventh largest U.S. conglomerate.
Before it filed for bankruptcy in 2001, company insiders sold their shares
of stock before Enron's imminent collapse, which wiped out 20,000 jobs and
$20 billion in pensions. Instead of being weighted down by the company's
fraudulent accounting, director Alex Gibney successfully focuses on key
players Jeff Skilling, Enron's former president and CEO, and his protégé and
CFO, Andy Fastow. The film's hero is famed accountant turned whistleblower
Sherron Watkins. Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, co-authors of the book
from which this documentary was adapted, guide the viewer through the murky
and complicated shell games that were created to disguise the fact that the
energy supplier wasn't making but losing vast amounts of money. The film's
smoking guns are audio excepts of Enron traders calling power plant
operators ("Let 'em use candles") to reduce electrical power (of which there
was plenty), causing the California rolling blackouts of 2001. Enron
implies that this was seen as a valuable opportunity for the George W.
Bush-connected and Texas-based company to bring down California's democratic
governor, Gray Davis. (The film describes Davis as popular, but he
was more often than not derided as a stuffed shirt and part of the party apparatus.)
Inundating the viewer with facts and figures, the details of the corruption
at Enron are generalized. The outlines of the scandal are lucidly made
clear. With an irony-laden narration by Peter Coyote, chapters are glibly
titled after such songs as "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" and "That Old
Black Magic." Before the financial fact findings become mind numbing, Gibney
keeps the images flowing, even tossing in some T & A for good measure (an
executive had a penchant for strippers). The director also makes effective
use of Enron's own corporate videos, catching Skilling in all of his
arrogant cockiness. Kent Turner
|
