It's a psychological drama set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the late 1980s.

Ann Bishop Mullany (Andie MacDowell) is an around-30 housewife married to a successful newly-promoted junior partner lawyer, John Mullany (Peter Gallagher). She is a quite uptight and unhappy person and no longer welcomes her husband's touch. John is a compulsive lier who is having a torrid affair with Ann's unmarried younger sister, Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo). Cynthia is an extroverted, artistic, and impulsive bartender.

Into their life comes Graham Dalton (James Spader), John's former college roommate who John has not seen for nine years. Graham is softspoken, but very direct in his demeanor, and asks probing questions. Ann learns that Graham's "project" is to interview women on videotape about their sexual history and desires. Cynthia and John also subsequently learn about this. Each of them responds differently, with profound impact on all their relationships.

This is a film that could only have been made in the 1980s and 1990s, when frank sexuality could appear in popular media like movies, but before the advent of social media that made any level of "trust" implicit in taped recordings related to sex impossible. So in that sense the movie is quite dated.

It's a very talk-heavy movie, with almost no visually-explicit sex. Peter Gallagher and Laura San Giacomo have relatively easy roles as insensitive jerks. Andie MacDowell plays the emotionally-tight, unhappy wife very well. James Spader portrays the enigmatic stranger well, but the ease with which he gets women to talk about their intimate lives seems far-fetched.