The rechristening of Enron Field is a matter apart from the greed and scandal that have alienated many, including me, from organized sports. My even earlier love affair with astronomy remains, though impenetrable “popular” books and lucid writing like Sagan’s and Ferris’ have not thrown light on black holes, dark matter, strings, quarks and quasars. How much more in the dark is the public, and the “expert” analysts, in the less exact “science” of economics, where no one seems to know what really goes down? On the wings of that blind faith, consumer confidence, futures and bulls and bears stumble along with business and its empires.

Binary with their superstars, several of the latter have lately imploded spectacularly, singeing other giants with them, and who truly fathoms their brief brightness and sudden turn to ashes in the mouth? What a squandered opportunity this was for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, written, directed, co-produced by documentarist Alex Gibney. Even beyond its failure as absorbing film or clarification, lies the waste of a wonderful tale just begging to be told but merely exiled to end-title print and two short moments of lamenting Portland General Electric linemen whose lifework $340,000 became $1,200. The hubristic fall of the big guys is not made the stuff of tragedy, and there is no populist development of the poor little guy. Easy innuendo rooted in Texas, California and Washington, DC, would link big politics bent by big money, but that hardly is revelation.

Facts and surmises are plentiful, but the manner of presentation, and its organization and focus, too, loses us after a promising beginning of skyscrapers dwarfing a church tower’s “Jesus Saves” and Cliff Baxter’s suicide. Some wag once quipped that C-SPAN is a cure-all for insomnia, and Gibney’s film is C-SPAN, figuratively in its interviews, audio and video clips, and brief recreations such as dice and roulette wheels to “illustrate” financial gambling, and most literally so in what seem hours of actual televised hearings which, if one didn’t watch then, why would one care to do so now?

Players Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Andy Fastow, Ken Rice, Tim Belden, Tom White & Co. are quite run-of-the-mill without their pockets on. The prurient, at least human, interest of sex-for-sale is early dissipated when Lou Lung Pai cashes in his chips to leave job and spouse for raising fancy horses outside Houston and a Colorado fiefdom with a new, ex-exotic dancer wife. So we are left with an unimaginative straightforwardly chronological account linked in Peter Coyote’s breathy bland narration and built around interviews reflected artsy-craftsy off glass tabletops and floor traders’ voices that are perfectly clear but nonetheless subtitled.

There are few surprises as one gets confused in jumbles of familiar but not quite placed names, abbreviations and acronyms. One learns as much -- as little, really -- from the press handout, pp. 4-11, “Timeline of Events,” without having to sit through big-screen Simpsons and commercial snips.

The fault lies in the way the source book has been adapted. The Smartest Guys in the Room; The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron (2003) by senior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who appear often in the film, grew from the former’s February 19, 2001, Fortune piece, “Is Enron Overpriced?” the first public questioning of the natural gas emperor’s new clothes. In the same magazine, the young woman has gone on to consider “The Fall of Fannie Mae,” where style is again appropriately suited for a particular knowledgeable readership; unfortunately, that audience is not us, the hypothesized general public, for whom business is Greek equally with astrophysics and specialty medicine.

There are suggestions, fleeting and not carried through on, that this modern South Sea Bubble did not start out as a con-job at the company’s 1985 merger-founding, but that human fallibility and arrogance soon commandeered the driver’s seat and, like Topsy, just grew. Now that might have been the guts of a movie, or, alternatively, the already mentioned agony of the small fry. But in not taking either human tack, and in not assembling cold facts in any way that grabs you, The Smartest Guys just isn’t very smart. Think of the difference between that special classroom teacher who passionately made a subject come alive, and the ones who intoned a litany that neither interested nor instructed. 

(Released by Magnolia Pictures.)