How Enron's Big Shots Got Into Trouble

By Richard Schickel

Viewers of Alex Gibney's film about Enron's collapse will not emerge from it with a comprehensive understanding of all the scams that the company's officers employed to drive the stock so high in the 1990s. Pawing through the paperwork is not what documentaries do best. This one, for instance, achieves its power by showing us the faces of Enron's leadership back when its genius was unquestioned.

The big names in this up-to-date Ponzi scheme--Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, right--declined, perhaps understandably, to grant Gibney formal interviews, but not to worry: there's plenty of old video, and in it they are completely, utterly plausible, nicely turned out, easy in manner, born to lead mighty enterprises into uncharted territory.

Gibney says he doesn't think Enron "set out to become fraudulent." At first it was just trying to cover up relatively modest failures. But watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, we realize we're not smart enough, attentive enough or sufficiently lacking in greed to penetrate the next great fraud when it rolls down--not if its masters truly believe in it and keep beaming. --By Richard Schickel