Happiness Collection

A woman breaks up with her boyfriend; he thinks it's because he's fat. A man is unable to tell his next-door neighbor that he finds her sexually attractive. An old couple wants to split up, but they don't want to get a divorce. A therapist masturbates to teen magazines. An 11-year-old kid is insecure about the fact that he hasn't masturbated yet. Office workers try to recall the face of a coworker who recently died. A woman is sure that she has everything she could ever want. The lives of these individuals intertwine as they go about their lives in their own unique ways, engaging in acts which society as a whole might find disturbing in a desperate search for human connection.

Separated from her incarcerated husband Bill (Hinds), Trish (Janney) is about to marry again. Bill is a pedophile, so Trish couldn't be more excited to have Harvey (Lerner), a "normal" father figure for her two sons. But when Bill is released from prison and the boys finally meet their future stepdad, the family is forced to decide whether to forgive or to forget. Trish's virginal, angelic sister Joy (Henderson), is also haunted by ghosts of lovers past. On leave from her degenerate husband Allen (Williams) and her job at a New Jersey correctional facility, Joy unwittingly leaves behind a trail of shame and exposed secrets wherever she goes. In one of the film's most stylized sequences, the image of Joy walking the dark streets of Miami in her nightgown maintains her innocence against a backdrop of self-affliction and desire.