Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Director: Alex Gibney, USA, 2005): It took a little while for me to get around to seeing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) but it was worth it. Everyone knows something about the collapse of Enron but how much do you know about “the smartest guys in the room” — Jeffery Skilling, Kenneth Lay, Andrew Fastow and Lou Pai.
Alex Gibney’s film provides a great overview of the Enron scandal by giving us a glimpse into the lives of some first class weasels. Lou Pai is by far the luckiest and the smartest of the weasels. He left the company with $280 million, became the second-largest land owner in Colorado and married the stripper girlfriend who had his love-child.
Without being too ‘preachy’, Gibney’s documentary shows how these guys thought they could outsmart the system. Their incredible greed and their willingness to rip off their stockholders and customers is legendary. There is a lot of information to absorb in this film but it does a fabulous job of explaining the whole scandal.