Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a fascinating, wonderfully funny and entertaining film. This is an especially impressive accomplishment when you consider that what the film shows us is an alarming parade of corruption, immorality illegality, lies, dishonesty, collusion, arrogance and a host of other despicable human traits. I’m sure if I were one of the over 20,000 people who lost my job or my pension due to this particular corporate fraud, or if I were a resident of California (where a substantial number had their pockets picked by Enron crooks) I wouldn’t find the film so amusing. In fact, I’m continually shocked that the only casualty of this scandal is one very sad suicide. After all, this happened in Texas. I’m surprised someone who lost their life savings hasn’t picked up a gun and gone hunting for some of these guys.

But, as a simple spectator, the careful dissection of just what a bunch of nothing besides failure and phoniness Enron was for much of the time (as the public was being sold the myth that this was a great company) provides entertainment as well as outrage. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room picks apart the myth of Enron, piece by piece, leaving you shaking your head.

Based on the book The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, the movie makes this story very easy to follow, almost too easy. You would think, or perhaps hope, that executing such enormous corporate fraud would be harder or more complicated, but one of the many things that Enron makes clear is that the tired tactics of threats and intimidation combined with a very well connected old boy network makes it much easier for people to go along with really big lies rather than confront the liars pushing them.

Like so many ongoing scandals degrading the country right now, some would have us believe that these kinds of scandals are perpetrated by “a few bad apples.” Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room makes it clear that scandals this large aren’t possible with just a few bad apples. Dozens of people, inside and outside the company, actively participated in this house of cards, while dozens, perhaps hundreds more inside and outside of the company, looked the other way, in spite of their feelings that something wasn’t quite right. A dozen or more banks loaned money they shouldn’t have loaned. Arthur Andersen, one of the most respected accounting firms in the country, disintegrated when their accounting practices on behalf of Enron were brought to light. Traders, attorneys and analysts, and not just those working on behalf of Enron, participated in deception after deception. Everyone was getting well paid, and no one looked beyond the money they were being paid.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is mostly very straightforward in its telling. A fairly traditional documentary, talking heads and archival footage make up most of the visual material. The authors of the book, several former Enron employees and other financial analysts and journalists talk about their experiences. Footage includes videotapes of corporate meetings, public and more private meetings, voice recordings of the vulgar and especially amoral traders talking about what they are doing in California in the last gasps of the scandal.

The movie spends considerable time looking at the three top executives responsible for Enron: Kenneth Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow. It begins with Lay and chronicles his life as a child growing up poor as the son of a preacher. (Dusty Springfield’s classic “Son of a Preacher Man” is used here. Creative use of tunes is a source of much humor in Enron.) Religion seems to have left him with a healthy dose of fanatic belief - an especially blind faith in deregulation - but little substance on issues like “doing unto others” with a Christian perspective. We hear of instances in the 1980s and early 1990s of corporate behavior where questionable practices were rewarded. Lay is the kind of “leader” to whom simple greed is the motivation and money and power are the goals.

His most able lieutenants are Skilling and Fastow. These two are also greedy, and, like Lay, they are also extremely impressed with themselves. These men are presented as tragic figures, and I found it awfully kind to suggest that their flaws are adequately summed up by the word hubris. Of course they suffer from hubris, but their personalities contain much more base human traits as well. They are insufferably self-righteous. The corporate culture at Enron was a clichÈ of macho nonsense and lemming-like devotion to the company.

Even though the inquiries that bring down the company are notable for their stunning simplicity, some of the questioners can barely believe the breadth and depth of the fraud. Bethany McLean says on camera that, at first, she was too naÔve to imagine just how phony the company’s profits were.

Guys like this would never acknowledge that our system isn’t perfect. The idea that corporations are innately and inherently virtuous entities is sacrosanct to them. Realities like corrupt people, incompetent people, market failures or a greater public good do not enter into their logic.

At different times we hear Enron execs proudly touting Enron’s innovative practices. They note that employees are always encouraged to ask “Why?” Well, as any student of philosophy 101 knows, the answer to “Why?” is “Why not?” What Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room proves in alarming specificity is that the prevailing attitude at Enron was “why not.” And the obvious answers to the “why not” of Enron - the quaint notion that a business idea can be wrong because it is obviously unethical, immoral and dishonest even if it isn’t obviously illegal - were not in the characters of the players.