Movies

Wyatt McSpadde

Very bad boys Lay (left) and Skilling in their gloating Enron prime.

Related Content

• Tim and Brian Bitch About the Oscars
  March 1, 2006
• The Devil's Rejects
  July 20, 2005
• Acclaimed by Your Mice
  January 4, 2006
• The Aristocrats
  August 10, 2005
• The Beautiful Country
  July 13, 2005

More About

• Kenneth Lay
• David Duchovny
• Robin Williams
• Todd Solondz
• Vienna

Share

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
Opens Fri., April 29, at Egyptian and Guild 45

Gordon Gekko lives, although not so entertainingly or flamboyantly as he once did. Eighteen years after Wall Street, history repeats itself with a new paraphrase of "Greed is good" in this interesting, but not interestingly told, documentary. The corporate mantra at Enron, founded in 1985 as a humble Houston gas pipeline company, is "Ask why." Sounds innocuous enough; there's nothing wrong with shaking up markets with a new approach to business. But Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay's mandate to do things differently and more profitably—including dubious accounting practices, outright fraud, and helping trigger California's 2001 power blackouts—omits its important moral corollary: Ask why not. In other words, when is it not OK to place near-term profits ahead of long-term sustainability? Of course Gekko, like Lay and his underlings Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow, would only roll his eyes at our naïveté for even asking.

Enron's big three criminals, all of them currently in varying stages of trial and imprisonment, are represented here in corporate videos, news footage, and perp walks. (Skilling: "We are the good guys. We are on the side of the angels.") Director Alex Gibney doesn't have any new interviews with the principals to offer; mainly he just follows the outline of the eponymous 2003 book by Fortune writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who comment along with other journalists, stock analysts, and disgruntled former Enron employees. If you read the book, or followed the news headlines, the movie doesn't really add anything new. If you didn't, you probably aren't interested in business scandals anyway.

Gibney starts with a cheesy America's Most Wanted–style re-enactment of a suicide by one Enron conspirator; he also adds musical comment by Tom Waits, Marilyn Manson, and Billie Holiday to try to hold the interest of those who don't regularly turn to the morning newspaper's stock tables. But there's only so much you can do to enliven a story where the crux of all wrongdoing is "mark-to- market" accounting (essentially claiming hypothetical future profits as today's revenues). Talking heads are talking heads, no matter what they've got to say. Unless you've got a Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock to personalize an important issue (even if that means buffoonery on their part), TV is the better outlet for the tale. You know a documentary is in trouble when it presents former California Gov. Gray Davis as a sympathetic figure.

We never really get a sense of what Lay, Skilling, and company were really like outside the boardroom. Nor are federal regulators' feet held to the fire (Bush 41 and 43 are loosely linked to Lay, but that's as far as it goes). We meet a few of the little people affected by a pension and retirement fund wipeout of $3.2 billion (!) without the hardships really being shown (think of the rabbit lady in Roger & Me). Gibney fails to capitalize on the enormity of the crime when it does, in fact, have all kinds of colorful potential. Thanks to a lawsuit brought by the Snohomish Public Utility District, there's a trove of Enron energy trader audio tapes that Neil LaBute would envy as material for the stage. As California suffers blackouts and brush fires, one guy crows, "Burn, baby, burn!" since the artificial electricity shortage was driving Enron's share price toward $100. Another adds, "Best thing that could happen is a fucking earthquake." Maybe that would've gotten our attention. (NR) BRIAN MILLER

House of D
Opens Fri., April 29, at Metro and others

There are some good things to be said about David Duchovny's largely bad writing/ directing debut. The story has real-feeling roots in his own life. Like the film's 13-year-old hero, Tommy (Anton Yelchin), Duchovny grew up with an unwealthy single mom in 1970s Manhattan, a private-school scholarship kid delivering meat via bicycle after class and dating Park Avenue girls whose luxe homes stunned him—the elevator door opened, and boom! You were standing in their vast apartments! Hookers in Greenwich Village's House of Detention used to holler at teenagers like him from their cells far above. Even the most stilted part of a stilted film, the framing tale in which Duchovny plays the grown-up Tommy—who's fled his troubled New York life to become a boho artiste in Paris—mirrors his actual past: His dad fled the family to be a novelist in Paris.

The grown-up-Tommy sequences are just a transparent excuse to get the film financed by putting Duchovny's mug briefly on-screen. Most of the movie covers Tommy's sad yet enchanted adolescence. Yelchin is pretty good as a gawky teen, making mischief at school—tricking the French teacher into uttering smutty English words—and delivering meat with his school-janitor friend, Pappas (Robin Williams), who has some strange form of retardation that takes the form of Williams' ghastliest, smarmiest sentimental performance. (Yes, he even out-Patches Patch Adams.) Téa Leoni (Duchovny's wife) isn't bad as Tommy's self-destructive, chain-smoking mom—also a sentimental role, but one closer to realism and not ruined by the self-indulgence of an 800-pound- gorilla star. (On his recent visit to Seattle, Duchovny mildly kvetched that Williams didn't take as much direction as Duchovny would've liked.)