Brosnan in particular, who plays the patriarch of a family devastated by the death of their teenage son in an automobile accident, was singled out for demonstration of audience affection, prompting those at Saturday morning's screening from their seats for an ovation that lasted maybe 15 seconds but felt like forever in the usually subdued early-morning setting. Sarandon and director Shana Feste felt the love as well, along with young co-stars Carey Mulligan, Johnny Simmons and Zoe Kravitz. We've been to a lot of public screenings over the years and seen and heard a lot of pushover audiences go nuts for film. This was one of those once- or twice-a-fest scenes where you could almost smell 600 people at the Racquet Club losing their shit. People love this movie.

But why? Brosnan (who also produced) is out of his depths as Allen Brewer, a mathematics professor maintaining his stiff upper lip while wife Grace (Sarandon) melts down completely following their son Bennett's fatal car wreck. Allen's determination to hold the family together is meant to reinforce his stone wall blocking grief, but in the presence of the more genuinely whacked Grace — who wakes up crying and spends months, in hopes of some closure, reading to the comatose driver who struck her son's car — it never feels like more than a high-stakes mourn-off punctuated by convenient expository fights, loving plunges into the ocean, etc.

It was a mindfuck for Sarandon, and the emotional imbalance shows in the parts of her performance not drugged within an inch of their life by Feste's potent script bromides.

"I have to admit that when I read it, it was so eccentric and there were a lot of things I didn't realize — until we actually started doing it —how difficult it was," she told the audience after the screening. "That was my bad. There are some actors who say they can never remember their real names when they're filming. I can never remember my character's name. When I go home to my kids, I completely leave it behind. I found on the days when we did some of the very, very emotional scenes that you have to hold on to for eight or 10 hours, my body chemistry actually changed. I was really shocked about how I smelled and the person I became. It was really horrible. That was the first time I realized that kind of impact when you imagine those things; your body can't tell the difference between what's imaginary and what's real."

So how did Sarandon and the others get through the 25-day shoot? "The cast was really, really fun and loving," she said. "It was a very happy set; sometimes I think we overcompensated. I think the two funniest sets I've ever been on were Dead Man Walking and Lorenzo's Oil. Explain that."

Yet there are two reasons to see The Greatest: Mulligan and Simmons, playing Bennett's pregnant girlfriend and messed-up little brother respectively, both extraordinary and nothing short of sincere in navigating the dynamics of their own grief. We'll get to this later today (and later this week in a little more depth), but Mulligan, whose Greatest and An Education performances had hype-within-the-hype momentum accompanying them before the festival even started, is an insanely vivid talent whose relationship with Allen Brewer is the only thing that salvages Brosnan's own performance; her retelling to him of meeting Bennett on their last day of school is devastating. At 23, and with little on her resume besides 2005's Pride and Prejudice and some British TV, she already improves everyone around her. Simmons, meanwhile, was also one of the only redeeming things about The Spirit, portraying the hero as a lovesick young man. His responsibility to parse his love/hate relationship with his mythologized brother refines that heartbreak here.

When — not if — The Greatest is bought (IFC Films execs, for starters, hovered excitedly outside the theater Saturday morning), it's destined to attract all the same gloom-fetish pushovers who got it up for Revolutionary Road and In The Bedroom before it. But here's hoping they recognize the actual best of it; it doesn't take much looking to find the real stars in all that pitch black.

Amid the contraction and pocketbook panic gripping the independents and mini-majors this winter, predicting a Sundance bear market seems a safe, obvious choice for 2009. But it also seems relative — especially following a year when sales of festival films reportedly plunged 66 percent from their collective 2007 high of $45 million, and eight-figure buys like Hamlet 2 (and its subsequent seven-figure gross) signaled a reality check that had little or nothing to do with an imploding economy. Distributors need content; they just don't need to walk away with one film to show for $11 million.

So what will they be spending on — and for how much — over the next 10 days? We scoured this year's selections for a few intrepid predictions:

· I Love You Phillip Morris. Jim Carrey is a cop who turns to crime, goes to prison and winds up falling in love with a fellow inmate played by Ewan McGregor. Adapted from a true story by the guys who brought you Bad Santa, Morris may not be the first film that goes (it doesn't premiere until Sunday), but it's already commanding the highest going rate at the fest and could tempt a Miramax or Fox Searchlight — the latter of which is one of the few potential suitors with the proven alacrity and class to successfully sell a film like this — to write a $9 million or $10 million check in the wee hours of Monday morning. If it's not this year's What Just Happened?, languishing overhyped, unfunny and out of place in Park City.

· An Education. Nick Hornby adapted his novel about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), a 16-year-old London girl whose coming of age is kick-started after meeting an older man (Peter Sarsgaard) in 1961. She's on her way to Oxford, he's on his way to a nightclub, holy Christ what will she choose? Word is that An Education is a starmaker for Mulligan, aided by another anticipated film at the fest (see below) and a supporting cast — Sarsgaard, Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina, Sally Hawkins — that will attract the likes of Sony Pictures Classics, Miramax and Focus Features for at least $4 million.

· The Greatest. Setting itself up as an In the Bedroom without the undercooked revenge subplot, The Greatest thrusts Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon into grief over the loss of their teenage son in a car accident. Mulligan appears as the dead kid's girlfriend, lessons are learned, Oscar clips ensue — again, if it's any good: Sundance's bead on middle-class white mourning is growing tired, and Brosnan's executive producer credit whispers "vanity project." But to the extent they even show up with any money at all, the Weinsteins and Paramount Vantage are suckers for this kind of stuff. It may not leave Park City with a deal, but we'll probably hear numbers between $4 million and $5 million throughout the week.

· Cold Souls. Paul Giamatti plays himself in the story of an actor, tormented by his forthcoming role as Uncle Vanya, who turns to a futuristic soul-freezing enterprise as a means of assuaging his anxiety. Which works great — until his soul is stolen and enlisted for use by a Russian soap star. On one hand, the quirk potential here is kind of skin-crawling. But on the other, director Sophie Barthes blew us away with her 2007 short Happiness, which skimmed similar themes with warmth and sincerity. Sony Classics won't want anything remotely Kaufmanesque after Synecdoche, New York, but IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures will probably fight over this in the $2 million range for its potential in both the theatrical and VOD arenas.

· Bronson. It may turn out to be this year's Wrestler — not for any stirring actorly comebacks but rather for an edgy tour de force take on crime, celebrity and class as seen through the psychotic eyes of Charlie Bronson (Tom Hardy), Britain's most notorious prisoner. Hardy will pull out an Eric Bana-style prison-saga breakthrough thanks to director Nicolas Winding Refn, whose Pusher Trilogy endures as one of the decade's great (and greatly underrated) cinematic achievements and whose style fuses hyperrealistic violence with Scandinavian chamber drama. It will polarize Sundance and stimulate salivary glands around the Fox Searchlight and Magnolia condos, from one of which (probably Searchlight, who's seen genre risks like Night Watch pay off before) will come a $3 million buy late next week. Bet on it.