Not only do paintings become props in the staging of this film, they actually comment on and participate in the narrative as tableaux vivants of the Bridges' unconscious desires. To understand the Bridges one must understand the story these canvases tell; in fact, it is the art of painting—in particular French painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—that gives unity to the plot of the film and supplies its central images.
— Marie Lathers (The Centennial Review)
Set during World War II, an upper-class family begins to fall apart due to the conservative nature of the patriarch and the progressive values of his children.