Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room

2007 • 109 minutes

About this movie

Alex Gibney examines the rise and fall of an infamous corporate juggernaut. Based on the book by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the film explores the lengths to which the company went in order to appear incredibly profitable, and reveals how Lay, Skilling, and other execs managed to keep their riches, while thousands of lower-level employees saw their loyalty repaid with the loss of their jobs and their retirement funds.

Ratings and reviews

This is movie is kind of hard to follow. It wasn't after an hour and some time that they actually got into the details of how Enron was exactly running their operations (aside from the accounting method). I see how the producers/director was trying to be artsy. If this movie hadn't come out such a long time ago, I would've compared this movie to a bad indie version of The Big Short style of filmmaking. Even after watching the movie, I still didn't have a clear, detailed explanation of how Enron was able to do everything they did.

It's amazing what the love of money can do to the humanity in others. When you start climbing that ladder of lies, with every step you take it becomes more difficult to come down. I was actually watching this for a school assignment in Business Ethics class but wow! I have really learnt about how dangerous the monster of greed is! At least we can all learn from this o that history does not repeat itself. I felt so bad for Clifford Baxter who committed suicide. If they acted ethically from the beginning, then all of this would have been avoided and maybe Enron would have still been around today.

What they fail to expose is that Arnie the terminator became a Billionaire through the Enron scandal. Look at all of the Planks of the Communist/Bosheviks' Manifesto... The government wants to do away with privately owned public works.