Just finished watching Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and I'm extremely disappointed. Filmaker Alex Gibney completely missed the mark in this adaptation of Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean's book of the same name. What should be a complex dissection of CFO Andy Fastow's financial shenanigans, an unforgiving examination of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay's dealmaking corporate environment, and a scathing indictment of Wall Street in the bull market of the 90s is instead little more than a dumbed down story of the big company that fell down and went boom.

Gibney inexplicably spends 30 minutes, well over a quarter of the movie, discussing Enron's role in the California electricity crisis of 2000-01. Nevermind that Enron, as Elkind and McLean clearly explain in the book, 1) never broke the letter of the law with their California transactions, 2) was just one of many companies engaged in profiteering during the crisis, and 3) actually made money from these transactions (whereas Enron went bankrupt because it ultimately lost money from other transactions -- most of which are ignored in the film). As if wasting our time with an irrelevant tangent isn't enough, Gibney concludes this segment of the film by implying that Enron is to blame for Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of California.

The film also tries to make much of alleged links between Enron and the Bush family, but as any reader of the book knows that while Ken Lay did little to deny a close tie to each President Bush, in reality his ties were tenuous at best, and in the case of the younger Bush virtually nonexistent.

Oh, and Arthur Andersen is barely mentioned.

The heart of Enron's misconduct was the creation of several partnerships by Fastow designed both to keep Enron's losses off the books and to make millions of dollars for Fastow and his cronies, yet Gibney devotes only about 10 minutes to these schemes. Most of those 10 minutes are consumed by Fastow's own conflict of interest and provide little information on what the partnerships were or why they were illegal. While it's true that descriptions of these special purpose entities are hard to follow (I suffered a lot of headaches while reading about them), their inexplicability was one of the reasons they succeed for so long -- because Wall Street analysts couldn't make enough sense of them to see the frightenting truth.

All in all, it seems Gibney simply wanted to make a movie everybody could watch and understand without actually dealing with the details. To accomplish this he played up the human (Lay and Skilling) and emotional (California and lost pensions) elements while downplaying the financial (everything that mattered). What this leaves is an oversimplified version of events that is nearly as deceptive as the one told by Enron itself.

Read the book.

Even as I struggle finding time to finish Elizabeth Kostova's enjoyable debut novel, The Historian, I've already got my eye on a couple of non-fiction books to take its place on my nightstand: The Rescue Artist : A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece, by Edward Dolnick: "In the predawn gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and fled with their $72 million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police called on the world's greatest art detective, a half-English, half-American undercover cop named Charley Hill. "In this rollicking narrative, Edward Dolnick takes us inside the art underworld. The trail leads high and low, and the cast ranges from titled aristocrats to thick-necked thugs. Lord Bath, resplendent in ponytail and velvet jacket, presides over a 9,000-acre estate. David Duddin, a 300-pound fence who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, spins exuberant tales of his misdeeds. We meet Munch, too, a haunted misfit who spends his evenings drinking in the Black Piglet Café and his nights feverishly trying to capture in paint the visions in his head. The most compelling character of all is Charley Hill, an ex-soldier, a would-be priest, and a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm. The hunt for The Scream will either cap his career and rescue one of the world's best-known paintings or end in a fiasco that will dog him forever." Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak: "A plucky 'titian-haired' sleuth solved her first mystery in 1930. Eighty million books later, Nancy Drew has survived the Depression, World War II, and the sixties (when she was taken up with a vengeance by women's libbers) to enter the pantheon of American girlhood. As beloved by girls today as she was by their grandmothers, Nancy Drew has both inspired and reflected the changes in her readers' lives. Now, in a narrative with all the vivid energy and page-turning pace of Nancy's adventures, Melanie Rehak solves an enduring literary mystery: Who created Nancy Drew? And how did she go from pulp heroine to icon? "The brainchild of children's book mogul Edward Stratemeyer, Nancy was brought to life by two women: Mildred Wirt Benson, a pioneering journalist from Iowa, and Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, a well-bred wife and mother who took over as CEO after her father died. In a century-spanning story Rehak traces their roles-and Nancy's-in forging the modern American woman. With ebullience, wit, and a wealth of little-known source material, Rehak celebrates our unstoppable girl detective."