If you've been to the Sundance Film Festival, once or many times, you probably associate the Eccles Center theater with the squeak of hard-frozen snow under your boots--at least if you were late and dumped your car along the banked snow in the peaceful nearby neighborhood.

When you're in the 1270-seat auditorium (which on Premiere nights carries the buzz of a home hoops game at your high school--if you went to a very big high school), you often sense that Indiewood history is about to be made--whether on the happy side, like recent successes Napoleon Dynamite, Hustle and Flow, and Little Miss Sunshine, or, alas, on the 115-35, repeatedly dunked-on side, like 2003's Masked and Anonymous. (Both its inspiration Bob Dylan and its director Larry Charles--he of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Borat)--can probably laugh about that film's frigid reception now).

An interesting aspect of this year's festival is that the grimness of the world beyond the snow-drifted valley of the festival home in Park City will not be as oppressively present as in recent years. As Variety found:

Fest director Geoffrey Gilmore noted that, surprisingly, the films on view this year "are not as political or social issue-oriented as last year. There's more personal expression about the daily aspects of lives, about people's state of mind. The fact is that the world around us is a very troubled place, but the response of the filmmakers isn't always dark, but is about people finding a way though it and about persevering, not succumbing. You sense the need for an escape from the exhausting pressures of reality."

This year the prized Sunday night at 6 p.m. Premiere slot is going to a Miramax release called Smart People, extensively developed for Focus by Michael Costigan and Bridget Johnson before it was put in turnaround and picked up--in every sense, including an influx of financing and film stars--by Michael London's Groundswell Productions. With Dennis Quaid at its center as Lawrence, a grumbly, self-important lit prof and Sarah Jessica Parker as his sometime student (now a doctor) trying to crack the hard intellectual shell, this is the brooding, interior persona that Quaid showed to striking effect in Far From Heaven (And today, as it was announced that he has sued the drug company that made the product which was inadvertently given his infant twins in too high a dosage, one can only send his family the strongest wishes of support and empathy.)

The film's secret weapons are Thomas Haden Church, as Lawrence's ne'er-do-well brother Chuck (an unwelcome lodger, though he presents his arrival as "a win-win" situation and makes himself luxuriantly at home) and Ellen Page as his acerbic, precociously Republican-leaning daughter Vanessa. (Mom is off in that movie purgatory along with what feels, this cinema year, like a thousand other widowers' disappeared wives.)

Ellen Page is hardly a real secret anymore. Her seriousness of intent is plain in her interviews (like this Los Angles Times) profile, but as she's demonstrated lately in Juno and even more forcibly here, she's a terrific farceur, because she can make buried rage deeply droll. Thus when she looks disgustedly at Chuck wearing her mom's Wellesley sweatshirt as he asks, "You ever get high?" she asks, "Why do I feel like I'm on an after-school special?" But she smokes a joint and watches a Spanish soap with him. "It's empowering," he explains, citing the matriarchal characters.

The film as written by Mark Poirer, also a novelist, and directed by commercial ace (see his droll, atmospheric work here) Noam Murro was shot for under $10 million in 29 days, as the director told the web site the boards, "I had a dolly and an old camera and a bunch of people in Pittsburgh. That was the budget."

For London, who also has The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Visitor (well received at Toronto and debuting in America at Park City) at Sundance, it was important that a festival crowed won't hold the film's s movie-star cast against it:

Audiences are a very picky about what they respond to, and I think critics don't want to be force fed anything. We have a film with movie stars in it, that is essentially a modestly budgeted independent movie with a first time director and a young writer. We started out to make a little indie movie, and then did get cast that gave it a higher profile--the trick now is to maintain that credibility. Little Miss Sunshine did a great job of that last year.

He's also happy to make the chilly walk to Eccles. Though he comes complete with distributor, there are a greater-than-usual number of films coming to the festival this year without one, obviously hoping for the kind of reception that sets the buyers to eye-gouging each other along Main Street. One such is another high-profile Premiere, this one unspooling for the first time as the opening night entry in downtown Salt Lake City. Playtone Productions' Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks are among the producers, with Hanks appearing briefly as the dad to the character's central figure, Colin Hanks' Troy. Director Sean McGinley's chief previous work was the moving documentary Brothers Lost: Stories of 9/11, which he made after losing younger brother Mark Ryan McGinley that day.

Buck Howard is autobiographical in a far different way. Once an aide to mentalist The Amazing Kreskin, McGinley has written and directed a darkly funny coming of age story starring the younger Hanks, white-hot Emily Blunt as a publicist, and John Malkovich as the title character. The production took over a large section of L.A.'s Veterans Administration facility one day last year, shooting a Las Vegas nightclub show as Malkovich, who seemed to be greatly enjoying the role, entertained a large flock of extras (including one table ins subdued Goth get-up) posing as patrons while Hanks pere and fils looked on.

Buck doesn't have a lot of irony," Malkovich said of the marginally desperate performer trying for a comeback, "so I think he's less deluded about whether people like him than he is deluded about how many people there may be that like him. His view of the world is he thinks everyone wants a signed headshot."

Through the good grace of the amiable McGinley I was able to watch the scene where Troy's dad gets to meet the man who for whom his son has dropped out of law school. As Malkovich says, "He came in with a lot of energy and had a very deliberate father feel--which I [recognized] even from my own father."

Malkovich's mellow wit seemed to make for a relaxed set. He's got an old pro's manner now, he says, though it wasn't always so: In the old days he'd listen to his own instincts first of all and drive scenes ": Wherever the mood struck me-- if they wanted something big, I was probably prone to do it small and if they wanted something small, I was probably prone to do it grandly.

In a scene opposite Blunt where he make sit clear "Buck hates women in a fairly profound way because they have tendency to take the attention away from him...it was a nice scene--we were having a competition because through every line of hers, I as saying `I' or using some personal pronoun. And it just got louder and louder. [Blunt] is so mature, adorable not nervous or intimidated, I was very impressed--and we laughed ourselves sick."

The seasoned actor praises Colin's skills in a role where much of the time is spent reacting. And points out, "The film is called The Great Buck Howard, but it's really about
Troy...yes, in a certain way, he's the kind of moth to Buck's flame. But the story's about the moth."

The endlessly humble Colin was grateful to find not only a professional study in Malkovich but "One of the most charming, funny men I've ever met. I'm happy to be the straight man to John's Buck."

Colin also thinks the guy playing his dad has a future: "l think for him, it was just a chance to forever capture on film him berating one of his kids...that, 'I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed' thing, which is the worst. But yeah, it was good. We needed some guy to hit that beat pretty hard and he...he hit it. That's for sure."

Both these pictures seem to typify what director Gilmore has pointed out about the 2008 festival's relative levity. It doesn't take much reminding of strikes, wars, and looming recession to feel like that's a break we can welcome.

(Ellen Page and Thomas Haden Church in Smart People)