The Unlikely Greek Chorus Singing the Enron Blues

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By ANTHONY DeCURTIS

Published: April 17, 2005


AS images of the gleaming, impregnable Enron towers fill the screen, a catarrhal voice rasps, "What's he building in there?" Sober-minded commentators appear, describing the huge scale of Enron's collapse in terse, broadcast-ready sound bites, but the jarring, doom-laden voice, like a skid row Cassandra, keeps returning: "He's hiding something from the rest of us," it declares over ominous clanks, thumps and whirs. "We have a right to know."

It's not the way you might expect a documentary about one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in American history to begin, but it's characteristic of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a film by Alex Gibney that is to open in New York and Houston on Friday. Like "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Super Size Me," this film is a blend of documentary reportage and pop-culture provocation. The voice of prophetic warning at the beginning belongs to Tom Waits; it's from "What's He Building?," a track on Mr. Waits's 1999 album, "Mule Variations." Mr. Waits gets the film's last word as well. As the credits run and the viewer's mind reels from the collapse of Enron's $65 billion empire, Mr. Waits's "God's Away on Business" provides an epitaph for the company's lawless, Darwinian worldview.

"There's a leak in the boiler room," Mr. Waits declaims with an air of jaunty dread. "The poor, the lame, the blind / Who are the ones that we kept in charge?/Killers, thieves and lawyers," he sings, then continues: "God's away on business." Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Manson, Philip Glass and 10 other artists join Mr. Waits on the "Enron" soundtrack, along with an original score by Matt Hauser, a commercial sound designer who had never written for film before.

"I wanted it to be like a toe-tapping Greek chorus that would comment on what was going on, even as it exemplified the mood," Mr. Gibney said about the music he selected for "Enron." As an example, he cited Holiday's "God Bless the Child," which accompanies a stark re-enactment of the suicide of J. Clifford Baxter, an Enron executive tainted by the scandal. "Like many aspects of the film, the song has two sides," Mr. Gibney said. "There's a beautiful melody and then these dark lyrics about power and exploitation."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/movies/17decu.html