Alex Gibney: Smartest Guy in the Room

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"If you’re entertaining people, you can say almost anything you want,” declares documentarian Alex Gibney, offering an aptly playful description of his hard-hitting, info-jammed, message-minded cinema. From Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) through this year’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money and the new Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Gibney coats his bitter pills with the sugar of dark comedy, as the men too big to fail—the men in whom we ordinary schmoes invest our trust, if not our cash—inevitably slip on banana peels.

In the eye-popping visual vocabulary of Client 9, for instance, Gibney likens Spitzer, the former New York governor turned sex scandal pariah, to a leopard on the prowl—scary and sympathetic, hungry and vulnerable.

What makes Gibney unique in this era of rampant first-person documentary is that, without his actual presence on screen ingratiating him with the viewer, the director nonetheless establishes an authorial personality as big as Michael Moore’s. His storytelling is uncommonly cinematic among documentary makers, and his themes are fall-of-Rome epic, more anthropological than psychological.

“You can see in my films that I get worked up about abuses of power and authority,” says Gibney. “Most corrupt individuals get away with their crimes by saying ‘trust me’—like the Enron guys, for instance. You act regal and you’re not questioned.”

Read more: http://www.utne.com/Politics/Utne-Reader-Visionaries-Alex-Gibney.aspx#ixzz19Wq8JgIr