Documentary follows the rise and fall of Enron Corporation, a Houston based natural gas pipeline company founded in 1985, which by 2001 was stating a net worth of $65 billion and viewed by their peers as the vanguard of American industry.

Enron’s stock price shot higher and higher, the company’s executive class – CEO Kenneth Lay, president Jeffrey Skilling and CFO Andy Fastow – reaped millions for themselves and their shareholders (mainly for themselves), while tens of thousands of employees willingly and even gleefully gambled their retirement funds against the price of Enron’s miracle stock. “Let the good times roll” comes to mind.

The executives had their sight set on taking Enron from being the world’s leading energy company to becoming the world’s leading company, period. But in March 2001, a Fortune magazine reporter named Bethany McLean wrote an article titled “Is Enron Overpriced?”, which opened the floor to the minority who were at a loss to explain how this “black box” company was making the profits it claimed it was making. “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is” comes to mind.

Based on the book of the same name by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the documentary is written and directed by Alex Gibney, who has a hard time getting out of his own way for the first fifteen minutes of the film. The soundtrack – which features everything from “Son of a Preacher Man” to Marilyn Manson’s cover of “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of These” to four kooky tracks by Tom Waits – is far too intrusive and poorly produced.

That said, the story of Enron’s demise is simply too good for any filmmaker to screw up for long. Gibney uses archive footage from congressional hearings and terrific interviews with former employees whose consciences are clean – such as plainspoken former Enron energy trader Mike Muckleroy, and development executive Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on her company’s accounting practices – to demonstrate that the Enron scandal was not a freak accident.

The film introduces the case of the Milgram experiment, a study conducted at Yale University in 1961, which tested how much pain an ordinary citizen might inflict on a stranger simply because they were ordered to by an authority figure, who assured them that they would not be held responsible. The study found that 50% of the test subjects ignored their moral imperatives and simply went along with the experiment because they were assured it was okay.

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room then asserts that Enron didn’t pull off the biggest corporate rip-off in history by itself. They had most of Wall Street, the government, Enron’s employees and anyone who bought stock in the company helping out.

Arthur Andersen – the oldest accounting firm in the country – signed off on a deal that permitted Enron to state as income any profit they thought they might make off a deal in the future. Instead of making money, Enron became skilled at moving it into shell companies, but had major banks like JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Citibank lining up to invest in those bogus companies because there was money to be made. The SEC looked the other way, thanks in part to George W. Bush, whose presidential campaign Lay contributed heavily to.

With support from Vice President Cheney, Enron pushed for deregulated markets. They bought up power plants in California, then shut them down at intervals, manipulating the demand and the price of energy. Enron traders engineered the electrical brownouts the state suffered in 2000 and played California like a yo-yo. This paved the way for Governor Gray Davis’ recall, the appointment of Kindergarten Cop as governor and massive debt Californians will be paying off for years.

The so-called checks and balances collapsed because nobody wanted to be the first one to raise his hand and state that any of this was wrong. It took a magazine reporter who was accused of “throwing rocks” at the company and an accountant with a conscience to speak up. By the end of 2001, Enron declared bankruptcy and gave its employees thirty minutes to vacate the building.

What a story. If you work for a corporation, or want to know how the economy really works, I highly recommend this movie. Actor Peter Coyote supplies the documentary’s intelligible narration.