One of years 'smartest' documentaries

Any political documentaries in the past few years have compromised their presentation of the truth in order to promote a partisan agenda -- most notably Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." Thankfully, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" does what it can to avoid politics. Instead, it tells a story about morality, lost in a haze of unchecked ambition.\nJeffery Skilling was proud of Enron once. As the film tells it, Skilling believed he was a "fucking smart" man. He saw Enron as a company full of smart people. It seemed to be a symbol of how dreams can conquer the constraints of reality. All one needed to do was live by Enron's slogan: "Ask why."\n"Why" not exchange oil the same way as stocks? "Why" not buy and sell Internet bandwidth as a commodity, like oil? Enron was the one company brilliant enough to single-handedly revolutionize the way business is done.\nBut for all of Enron's ambition, there was little restraint. They dumped $1 billion on a plant in India that generated energy the nation couldn't pay for. Later, Enron worked on a system for delivering broadband video over the Internet -- that never actually worked.\nThe movie tells a story about people you and I probably know: people who have great fun dreaming up new ideas, but lack the discipline to work out the details.\nSome credibility is lost when one of the interviewees speculates about why federal regulators did not intervene when Enron sold electricity to California for several times more than to other regions.\nHowever, a viewing of the DVD's deleted scenes shows that the filmmakers had cut out a lot of material on California. Some of it would have further harmed the documentary's credibility if left in. On the other hand, it also would have distracted from the story the filmmakers really wanted to focus on.\nDeleted scenes and other bonus features do, however, make this DVD worth seeing for those who saw the film in theaters. They offer more details and more insight on the documentary's principle characters. In fact, the bonus features arguably make the story more complete than the theatrical released version.\n"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" is ultimately a cautionary tale. It's about three men whose ambition was uncontrollable. Their egos drove them to keep making Enron bigger and stronger. They could not see that they had built something that would ultimately destroy them.