Financial Fahrenheit 2001 was the collapse that year of George W. Bush's biggest campaign contributor, a home-grown Texas company that took 16 years to go to $65 billion in value, then 24 days to go bankrupt. "It's not a political issue, it's a business issue," said Dubya.

	Wyatt McSpadden Former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, left, and former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling are the subjects of the "Enron" documentary. Click photo for larger image. "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room" Rating: Unrated but PG-13 in nature for language. Director: Alex Gibney.

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" shows it was very much both and does so in an impeccably documentary form that puts Michael Moore's controversial personal hyperbole to shame. Indeed, it requires a far more measured journalist approach to unravel the largest corporate fraud in history than to make a circumstantial case against the confederacy of 9/11 dunces.

Director Alex Gibney's riveting economic thriller -- hitherto an oxymoronic concept -- begins by introducing us to Enron mastermind Kenneth Lay, a man George I and George II called "Kenny-boy." But the story's deep background begins with the telegenic "vision thing" of a man called The Gipper.

"Government is not the solution to the problem," says Ronald Reagan. "It is the problem."

The answer to that problem was "the magic of the marketplace," better known as deregulation and no better exploited by anyone than Enron's Lay and wunderkind Jeffrey Skilling. Gibney's careful selection and sequence of news footage -- juxtaposed with subsequent interviews of the principals -- shows how the Reagan-Bush removal of virtually all accounting, pricing and other regulatory controls paved the way for Enron's multibillion-dollar (taxpayer-subsidized) profits. And for other little things like the California rolling-blackouts crisis.

Enron's power and glory -- however short-lived -- stemmed from its "rogue" financial officers' and accountants' creativity in figuring out how to transform power plants and other energy sources and resources into "financial instruments" that could be traded like stocks and bonds. The more successful it became at that, the more Enron's whole corporate raison d'tre metamorphosed from cooking up real energy to cooking the books.

Books that nobody could understand, thanks to an elaborate maze of phony subcompanies created to hide the actual debts behind the fake profits.

Profits that went to pay obscene multimillion-dollar "bonuses" for the executives hiding the debts.

Debts that were sanctioned by Arthur Andersen, with its HFV -- Hypothetical Future Value -- accounting procedures.

Procedures that were deliberately overlooked by Merrill Lynch and the Who's Who of U.S. banking institutions that gave Enron its bottomless reserve and endless supply of cash.

Credit for exposing this goes largely to Bethany McLean, the young Fortune magazine business reporter who first seriously questioned Enron's practices, and whose low-key, explanatory presence in this film adds great weight to it.

Perhaps most fascinating is something Gibney doesn't and can't explain about the Enron saga: the American voters' failure to remember it -- and John Kerry's failure to remind them of it -- three short years later in 2004.

The bottom line of Gibney's extraordinarily thorough, enlightening documentary is that the smartest guys in the room weren't really Kenny-boy or Jeff Skilling but Karl Rove and the Republican magicians who made them disappear.