Delayed Reaction: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

The Pitch: OK, how can we explain Enron in a way that isn't boring as shit?

I remember when Enron went out of business. I was 14 at the time and it didn't mean much to me. I hadn't heard of the company until it went out of business, then everyone told me how it was a huge deal. I didn't get it. I remember this documentary too. I avoided it. It came out in a time of really smug documentaries that annoyed the hell out of me. Michael Moore had a mega-hit with Fahrenheit 9/11. Morgan Spurlock got famous with Super Size Me, a documentary that "exposed" the fact that McDonalds wasn't healthy to eat. Not long after this came Maxed Out, about credit card debt, which I had trouble coming up with any empathy for, and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of a Low Price. All of these movies went after easy to hate targets and didn't have much insight that I could find. As I've said many times, I prefer documentaries that are investigations, not essays to prove a point that the documentarian knew going in.

I'll say this much. I liked Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room more than those other documentaries I just mentioned.

I think it comes down to this. Enron was too busy untangling this mess to be annoying about the topic. There's so much to cover with the rise and fall of Enron. There's a lot of shady executives doing even shadier things. Most of it is quite complex. Alex Gibney does what he can to simplify it, and I almost feel like I understand what happened after watching this. The doc is a little overproduced, perhaps in an attempt to counteract the sleepier parts of the story. This doc takes more of a "what the hell happened?" perspective than the "here is how Enron is emblematic of everything that is wrong with corporations" angle that I was expecting. For topicality, I get why this was such a highly regarded documentary when it was released. A dozen years after its release, it sure feels dated/disposable to me.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend