Marina, I think your comments are apt and well-put but I still feel the female represents the embodiment of Barry's fears and I don't see the Philip Seymour Hoffman character as symbolic per se. I found the climactic confrontation between Sandler and Hoffman to be less of a bang and more of a whimper. There's a lot of yelling and a buildup towards violence but it all peters out (both back down) and Barry storms out of the furniture store. It may seem that a breakthrough was achieved but nothing has really happend.

You're right--the saddest betrayal is his brother-in-law's big mouth but his rage--which Anderson, while not endorsing, certainly is sympathetic towards--isn't directed at his brother-in-law, it's directed at his sisters, either by smashing their sliding-door windows or threatening them over the telephone from Hawaii. And in fact, you could argue that the thugs he beats up late in the film are surrogates that absorb the punishment theoretically intended for Hoffman. I wouldn't suggest the thugs are surrogate women but the last one, the one Sandler spares, is reduced to a whimpering impotency; they certainly aren't the blustering macho men that Hoffman pretends to be and who Sandler can't bring himself to take out. That struck me as kind of Freudian in itself.

To me, the breakthroughs are with Lena both in the middle of the picture, as he establishes a firm bond with her, and at the end, when he begs her forgiveness for abandoning her at the hospital. He has to learn to connect, or at least to fufill his goal of connecting, and divorce himself from his violent tendancies. But Lena, while surely more skilled at relationships, is still as alienated from the rest of the world as he is. I think, in this case, it's two against the world--she may be a catalyst but she's as alone as he. The romance is symbiotic, not individual. He doesn't find her, they find each other.