Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, documentary) or, Something Wrong in America

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The corporate villains of Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room smirk on its deft poster

The story of giant energy corporation Enron gets unfolded: Its fraud, key figures, culture, sins and victims.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a fabulous documentary by New-Yorker master documentary writer-director Alex Gibney (The Ruling Classroom (1980)), based on the same-titled 2003 book by Bethany McLean (All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (2011)) and Peter Elkind.
Gibney keeps an impressively high number of balls in the air and somehow still manages to serve this fundamentally exciting, scandalous story with what feels like the perfect number of plot points, experts, words and minutes. More than once the film uncovers decidedly horrifying details. It is an alarming and dispiriting, blessedly sober journalistic accomplishment.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room achieves an added gleam of absurd theater from Gibney's use of Tom Waits songs. Along with many other also fine choices from popular music, he skillfully applies a side character to the Enron disaster; namely that it was more than a unique one-time incident based on a gathering of especially rotten apples in one executive branch, - that the real reason behind it must be a larger, cultural issue.
- Ouch!

 

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2005 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 0.7 mil. $
Box office: 4.8 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room premiered 22 April (USA) and runs 109 minutes. The film opened #40 in 3 theaters to a 76k $ first weekend in North America, where it peaked at #16 in 151 theaters and grossed 4 mil. $ (83.3 % of the total gross). It was released in 6 foreign markets. The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets for it were Australia with 419k $ (8.7 %) and the UK with 303k $ (6.3 %). Roger Ebert awarded the film 3.5/4 stars, one notch harder than this review. The film was Oscar-nominated as Best Documentary, which it lost to March of the Penguins. It was also nominated for the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance and won the Best Documentary Award from the Film Independent Spirit Awards. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is certified fresh at 97 % with an 8.1 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

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