IN THE MAIL: An advance copy of the Enron documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It’s not bad, though it’s pretty dependent on C-SPAN footage of Carl Levin, Barbara Boxer, et al., calling people crooks — and during one discussion of a sham transaction involving Nigerian power barges, we’re shown footage of what looks like a Liquified Natural Gas tanker, which doesn’t inspire confidence.

There’s a definite tinge of political correctness throughout the film, in which the desire to make money is consistently characterized as morally suspect. (Ironic, given that the film was backed by Mark Cuban). Though there’s a passage in which we’re told that California’s partial deregulation of electrical power made no economic sense, Enron seems to get the blame there, too. Explanation of Enron’s business model is weak, and the viewer is left with no clear idea of why so many people thought it could make money. The term “free markets” keeps coming up in pejorative contexts. (One of the anti-free-market interviewees is former TVA executive David Freeman. It’s no surprise that he feels that way.) And interspersing tapes of power-traders talking with footage of people giving victims shocks in the Milgram experiments seems a bit, well, Michael-Mooreish.

I suspect that a lot of people will like the film anyway. But my sense is that even though there’s plenty of blame for Enron here, the film’s consistently anti-capitalist tone will make it less persuasive than it might have been.

UPDATE: Trailer in QuickTime and WMV. Film website here, with a Director’s Statement about “the cruelty of our economic system” and the evil of greed. I think it would have been more interesting to have made this film as less of a conventional morality play.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Andrew Olmsted didn’t think it was as heavy-handed as I did. Though “heavy-handed” isn’t quite what I meant: The slant isn’t overwhelming, just very consistent.