The Sundance Film Festival, said founder Robert Redford from the stage of the Eccles Theatre on Thursday night, is "like a bullet train ripping through Park City for 10 days."
If so, the bullet train isn't quite up to speed yet.
Traffic is snarled, hotels are full and snow is falling, but Thursday's opening-night offering of four features and one shorts program was a low-key way to start things off, with likeable movies but caution in the air for now.
"I think it's pretty obvious we're in a period of tremendous change," said Redford when he took the stage to introduce the evening's first film, Lauren Greenfield's documentary "The Queen of Versailles."
Also read: Sundance Party List 2012: A Guide to Hollywood's Snowy Fun Festival
"Some people fight it, and some people embrace it. We can see the people who fight it, and we see what they're doing. But we embrace it."
He talked about the dramatic changes in Sundance over the last 28 years, and about how the fuss surrounding the event can be distracting.
"Sometimes the point of who we are and why we're here gets blurry," he said. "We are about the independent filmmaker… We should keep focused on the fact that this is about the filmmakers and about the work."
On Thursday, that work began with "The Queen of Versailles," which Greenfield described as "a movie about dreams, both collective and individual, and what happens when things go wrong."
In her film, those dreams are astonishingly grandiose: The director spent years following timeshare mogul David Siegel and his wife Jackie, who lived a life of unimaginable opulence even before they decided to build the biggest single-family house in the United States, a 90,000-square-foot Florida palace inspired by Versailles.
The Siegels are fascinating and often astounding characters, with David bragging that he was personally responsible for the election of George W. Bush, though he won't say how "because it might not have been legal." And with her clearly sizeable plastic surgery budget and unfathomable spending sprees, former beauty queen Jackie – who was in the audience at Sundance – takes "Real Housewives" excess to an unbelievable level.
When the crash of 2008 happened, the Siegels took a huge hit, and construction halted on the palace while the family tried to live within its means. (At one point, Jackie rents a car from Hertz and asks the dumfounded clerk, "What's the name of my driver?")
David Siegel sued Greenfield and Sundance over a press-release description that said his house was foreclosed; the suit is ongoing, and Greenfield quickly deflected a question about it in the post-screening Q&A. (In the film, David says the bank "started foreclosure" on the property, and Jackie later says, "I didn't know the house was in foreclosure.")
In today's climate, it's tricky to try to make the 99 percent feel sorry for the one percent, which is what "The Queen of Versailles" tries to do at times.
