Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Herald rating: * * * *

With impeccable timing this Oscar-nominated documentary on the most famous and scandalous corporate collapse of recent times arrives just as the trial of former Enron bosses Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay on charges of fraud and conspiracy heats up in Houston, Texas.

Prolific documentary-maker Gibney crafts a lucid and chilling portrait of the Enron story, in the process exploding any illusion that may have remained that the energy trader, once the seventh-biggest company in the United States, fell to anything as banal as bad luck or bad management.

The film, which essentially illustrates the exhaustive and impeccable research of Fortune magazine business writers Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean, documents greed, deceit and cynicism that is breathtaking in its audacity and scale.

Lying became central to the company's modus operandi early on, but the film unpacks the sickening history piece by piece; just when you think you've seen it all (the creation of "Hypothetical Future Value" - think of a number - as a basis for financial reporting), there is worse to come (the deliberate and surrealistically lucrative manufacture of the 2001 California energy crisis). It's an extraordinarily entertaining film that never loses sight of the sobering fact that, as so often, little people paid for the failures of big people.

If the film has a fault, it lies in its failure to draw general conclusions from the specific story: the credulity, verging on complicity, of brokers and financial journalists who swallowed hype as fact is a strong thread in the movie. But the wary might wonder how likely it is that the same thing won't happen again.

DIRECTOR: Alex Gibney
RUNNING TIME: 109 mins
RATING: M
SCREENING: Academy, from Thursday