The strength of Alex Gibney's entertaining and enraging ''Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" isn't just that it simplifies the best-selling book by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind so that mere mortals can understand what happened. The new documentary says that everyone on the bandwagon was complicit; it implies, moreover, that the timbers of the bandwagon itself were rotten with go-go avarice.
This is refreshing. The Enron debacle -- the biggest bankruptcy in US history, followed by revelations of fraud on an unprecedented scale -- is too easily cordoned off as an example of corporate arrogance run amok. But no one does what Lay and company did without help, as well as an awful lot of people looking the other way. Gibney points fingers.
In some cases, that's all he can do -- there was, after all, a whole lot of shredding going on. ''Smartest Guys in the Room" is at its weakest (albeit funniest) when it forgoes the evidence and leans on Michael Moore-style song cues such as ''Dear Mr. Fantasy" or overreaches for some random celebrity-bashing. More tasteless is the use of filmed re-enactments for the suicide of Enron executive Cliff Baxter or to ''illustrate" Enron Energy Service head Lou Pai's obsession with strippers.
On the other hand, how do you turn down a gift from the documentary gods such as an Enron in-house gag video featuring appearances from Bush father and son? Or a recording of the conference call in which Skilling melted down and swore at an analyst? Or phone tapes of Enron traders viciously gloating over squeezing California dry during the state's energy crisis? Or videos of company town meetings, where, over the course of several years, Lay lied through his teeth, urged employees to buy stock he was busy unloading, compared Enron's fall to 9/11, and, finally, was asked by an employee, ''Are you on crack?"
