May 6 , 2005

Happy Cinco de Seises...

So Star Wars has taken off... summer has finally begun...

I wrote about it a bit on the blog yesterday and frankly, I don't have much interested in rehashing it again today. There is plenty to discuss, but there will be plenty of time to discuss it with the world after they have a chance to see the film. When both trades fired out their reviews yesterday as breaking news, I simply had to laugh. And most outlets I've read are squeezing all they can out of their trips to LucasFilm with no spoiler warnings... so be careful.

I'm very curious to see the film again because I suspect that it will be quite a different experience without the surprise element. But in spite of many flaws, there are more than enough of those surprise to send anyone who wants to know the score to the theater and to take away good memories and things to chew on. And if you go in looking to be disappointed and enraged, I'm sure you'll find a way to do that too.

Anyway...

Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is quite a pleasant stop on the documentary trail. It's interesting that Magnolia Pictures and HDNet Films decided to release it cross-platform because it really does seem best suited to the small screen, where its limitations aren't as obvious and the colors of the high-def photography are really impressive.

The film takes its shots at the Bush Administration, but doesn't really make the case, and utterly avoids any mention of the Clinton Administration, during which most of the Enron shenanigans took place according to the film's reportage. This has become an Achilles heel for a lot of docs recently, which is a shame, since there is plenty to pin to the Bush family and the unbalanced handling diminishes the power of those arguments.

That said, the Bush stuff turns out to be little more than a sidebar. The central things to hook into here are the actual actions that built Enron, the fury of the stock market during the internet boom, and the shocking speed with which the house of cards fell.

The weakest part of this beautifully stylized film is the explanation of how Enron grew. If you go into the film understanding the commodities market, it might make complete sense. But for the layman, which is the group the film is clearly targeting, it can be a bit of a blur. It's almost as though the filmmakers threw up their hands and said, "We can tell the Enron story or we can educate people about how crazy the stock market is... not both." They chose the former.

But by the end of the film, I had a slightly different take. The basic story of Enron is that they, like any other company, had wins and losses. And for the most part, they had more wins than losses. But they ran into trouble when they, essentially, refused to take fiscal responsibility for the losses in an endless effort to keep meeting every fiscal landmark, thus keeping the stock rising endlessly in a period of a seemingly ceiling-free stock market. Inevitably, the chickens came home to roost. The shell game and company were over within months.

Perhaps the reason the film doesn't lay on the absurdity of the scam the company's management ran is that the audience would be incredulous. How could everyone on the outside be that stupid? The film explains the answer to that question, but still... way too obvious.

It's not unlike the obviously disastrous willingness of Time-Warner to sell itself to AOL based on an insanely inflated stock price that anyone not swept up in the moment could have seen had to fall. But the machinery of the business, from the market itself to the media that covers it to the stock analysts, all have a vested interest in success, not failure. It's great to be the only one who got the joke after the pies have all hit the floor. But as everyone is in the middle of the pie fight, all happy and laughing and just wanting it to go on forever, that person is just a Chicken Little pain in the ass.

This is, however, another flaw in Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, in that there is little perspective offered about how many other companies went down some of these same roads. The extraordinary thing about Enron is that it was the perfect storm of real success, insane arrogance, and outright fraud. The stock boom era companies that didn't have the success are gone, but most never got that big. The companies that combined success with arrogance are mostly still cleaning up the mess from that time, but are healthy or on their way to health now. And I'm sure that some companies that combined either success or arrogance with fraud are still around or more quietly doing jail time than the Enron crew. But in the Enron's case, it was the success and the arrogance that made the fraud possible on the massive scale that it came to be.

And that is what is scariest about the story of this film to me. Enron was special... but not all that special. It wasn't a political creation. These men were not inherently evil. In fact, Jeff Skilling, for all of his personality flaws, was the genius of the idea. Ken Lay was a master of the politics of corporate politics on the national stage. Andy Fastow played the game that the system both allowed and demanded of a big time CFO brilliantly. And then, in the tradition of war movies, they went too far. Very quickly, there was no way to go back that wouldn't hurt a lot. So they went farther and farther until they couldn't keep the charade going anymore.

How close to the sun do all the Icaruses of business fly?

I guess that is the story that would draw me further in. Still, Alex Gibney continues to impress with his choices and Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is very well made and well worth the two hours of your life that it will take to get a much clearer picture of just what happened in one of the most talked about, least understood business disasters of the modern age.

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN... what's left to say? I seem to like it more than most of my colleagues. In fact, I find the reviews that don't get the power of the overall theme kind of shocking.

For me, Kingdom of Heaven is a fairly sophisticated look at the challenges of morality, loaded with gray after gray after gray. The only solid black or white in the film is Orlando Bloom/Balian's sense of morality, which does not preclude killing others and other side of the film, Ghassan Massoud/Saladin's similar sense of morality.

Perhaps it is too overt for some... perhaps they have gone too long between considering these issues themselves. When Saladin discusses whether he or Allah is responsible for the victories of war, it is a crystallization of the great questions we face as nations moving forward in a world that is long past the kind of isolation that allowed Hitler to operate so freely for so long before the U.S. was drawn into WWII.

These are the great questions, in my opinion, of our future. Fighting endlessly about whether George W. Bush tricked America into going into Iraq is great fun, but it is a discussion of history. The real question is whether America belongs in any other sovereign nation that has not directly attacked this nation. And be careful before you answer smug, since that includes countries like Rwanda. What is the role of America in the world, morally, economically, militarily? There are no easy answers. But this is the discussion. And I think, for all of its blam blam, Kingdom of Heaven tries to address these issues.

For critics and media watchers, the discussion is less deadly, but equally tough. What do we expect from films in terms of addressing the human condition, both on personal issues and those of the world? It is all too easy to gripe about the crappy entertainments that are the most popular of films. But there are more ambitious films... and the media rarely supports them. And when a film like Kingdom of Heaven clearly has more on its mind than, say, Troy, whose politics were all personal, don't we have a responsibility to discuss this with potential viewers, even if the film fails in our personal opinions?

For all of the real anti-Bush rage going on in about 25% of this country, this is not the 60s, when Dr. Strangelove could play that text/subtext game so effectively. America is not in the kind of internal conflict that it was 40 years ago. The major political clashes (environmentalism, military interventionism, the fiscal stability of the union) are about the future, not about the now. There are men and women dying in Iraq every day. But as the last election showed, this is not where the fight hits home, no matter how callous that may seem to those losing loved ones overseas. Art and artists are still trying to find their legs to power their work to meaning without driving their audiences to boredom. We must support that search as best we can or it will wither on the line and we will all be Scooby Doo out of luck.

E-ME. How do you view political movies? Will you engage? How tolerant do you find yourself when you see them?