I’ve written before about the distinction that must be drawn between a documentary and a piece of entertainment, and how some purported documentaries fall much more in the category of the latter than the former. A good documentary should investigate, educate, explore, expose, and along the way, entertain. But it should not put entertainment above education, and while Enron is a good documentary, it too often strays from the path and becomes enmeshed in attempts to charm the audience rather than present hard solid facts.
Not that facts aren’t presented here–plenty of them, to be sure, make up vital portions of the movie. There are interviews throughout the movie with several individuals who worked at Enron as well as Bethany McLean, the reporter who broke the story of Enron’s scandals in 2001 (as well as co-author of the book on which this movie is based), corporate whistleblower Sherron Watkins, and even Gray Davis, the former governor of California. Snippets of congressional hearings, particularly those involving Jeff Skilling, the president of Enron, are revealing and sometimes tough to sit through, as we watch him dance around the truth and even outright lie to his inquisitors about what happened at Enron and the key role he played in the downfall of the company.
Aside from the interviews, Alex Gibney, the director, does a pretty good job of using archive footage, newspaper and magazine articles, and other sources to document the rise and fall of one of the country’s largest and most powerful energy companies. More importantly, I have a much better sense of what happened during the downfall of the company, and why it happened.
Where the movie falls apart, though, is in its presentation of all the material. Whereas master documentarian Ken Burns takes a slow, careful look at his subjects, lets interviews clips go as long as they need to, and allows the material itself to carry the viewer through an (often very long) film, Gibney has a very MTV-style approach that just doesn’t quite work as well. Interviews and archive footage are often inter-spliced with TV clips, rock music, and created bits that strive to capture the short attentions span of a generation weaned on Michael Bay-style editing. One segment, in discussing the excesses of Enron corporate trips, uses clips of dirt bikers performing X-games stunts in the desert while the narrator describes how Enron execs would sometimes go ride motocross to help build teamwork and leadership. I’m no dirt biker, but I’m pretty sure Ken Lay and Andrew Fastow wouldn’t launch themselves 20 feet into the air while doing backflips. Time and time again Gibney uses this type of editing as he explores the depth of the Enron bankruptcy rabbit hole (particularly in an entirely gratuitous segment discussing the after-hours trysts of executive Lou Pai) and I found it to be distracting and unnecessary.
The story of Enron’s collapse is wholly interesting and engaging by itself, and had this movie stuck to just the facts, ma’am, I would be able to highly recommend it. As it stands, though, I would say go give it a watch, but maybe read the book instead.
Documentaries can be as subjective as their creators want them to be, and footage, interviews, points of view, and even shooting locations can be manipulated to support any political agenda or other motive that the director has. Extreme examples of this can be found in any of Michael Moore’s sensationalist films, which can only be called documentaries by the loosest possible definition of the word, and even in other works such as Morgan Spurlock’s faux-indictment of the fast food industry in Super Size Me, and Ben Stein’s biased look at intelligent design in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (which I thought was a good film, but I was fully aware of its political bent and, thus, the biased nature of the material which was being presented). Waco: Rules of Engagement is surely guilty of these same transgressions to some degree, but without an opinionated narrator advancing the examinations being presented onscreen, and with so much of the footage taken directly from congressional hearings in the years following the tragedy, it lends a greater deal of credibility that many documentaries tend to lack.
Interviews shown in the film of fellow Branch Davidians also show a group of people who were simply looking for answers, and for whatever reason, found them in Koresh and the end-times theology of the Branch Davidians. Where the film truly shines, though, is in showing how mishandled and bungled the attacks on the compound, begun by the ATF and carried to a bloody end by the FVI, really were. Through extensive footage taken from the aforementioned congressional hearings, this film documents incredible lapses in the chain of command, confusion on the part of the agents on the ground, and shows how the situation grew beyond control and ended up in the tragic killing of not only Koresh but dozens and dozens of his followers, many of whom were women and children.
Lewis and Clark showcases Ken Burns’ talents as a masterful documentarian, and intricately details one of the most grand adventures in history. Â It continues the tradition he set forth years prior with The Civil War, and I am eager to see his other films about baseball and World War II. Â What I found most remarkable about Lewis and Clark was how intricately Mr. Burns detailed so many aspects of their historic journey into the wild unknown, mostly through the use of narrated selections from their letters and journals. Â The majesty of the great prairies, the intensity of the summer heat and bitter winter cold, the interactions with both friendly and adversarial Natives, the desperation the Corps faced as they stared at the Rockies with no forseeable way to cross before winter…it’s all captured in this film in a very real and personal way that is rare among documentaries.
The premise of the movie seems benign enough: two strapping East Coast lads set out to plant an acre of corn so they can find out what happens to their crop once its all growed up and ready to set out on its own. So they head off to Greene, Iowa, where (it turns out) their great-grandfathers both grew up together. They rent an acre from an old lifelong Iowa farmer and set about tilling, planting, fertilizing, and eventually spending the night with 180 bushels of their own corn. Along the way we find out about how much farming has changed in the past several decades, how our desire for cheap food has led to an explosion in corn production, and why High Fructose Corn Syrup is basically like drinking liquid secondhand smoke.
I never got the medal. But, many years later, my admiration for Arnold only increased when I saw Terminator 2 in my friend’s basement, and ever since I have had somewhat of an odd admiration for not only the man’s charming ability to anchor a movie but to be a positive influence in the world of physical fitness (a decade of steroid usage in his youth notwithstanding).
