He shall return no more to this house;

neither shall his place know him any more.

- Book of Job 7.10

Thanksgiving tradition prompts Americans to give thanks for the bounty granted our nation by a generous, just and loving God.

So we do this, even if it does seem suspiciously self-congratulatory at times.

We also honor the holiday protocol of voicing - or at least reflecting upon - the many blessings for which we are thankful individually and as family members. I'm down with that.

As pastors of various faiths hasten to remind us, this is something we should be doing all the time, not just at Thanksgiving. But even if the gratitude lasts only through dessert, the holiday that inspires it is bona fide. A day devoted to thankfulness is a day well spent.

The holiday's other aspects are also praiseworthy: the desire to gather as a family; the impulse to do something kind for a stranger; the instinct to share meals, laughter, stories, fondness, football.

All good.

The only way Thanksgiving falls short is in what it does not ask us to do; that is, to imagine life without all those blessings. Thanksgiving does not ask: What if God repossessed that 96-inch flat screen HDTV?

Luckily, we have the Coen brothers for that. In their new release, "A Serious Man," filmmakers Joel and Ethen Coen systematically strip their hapless protagonist of everything he owns, values, cherishes, clings to or hopes for. Then they cast him out of his home and into a seedy motel called The Jolly Roger. Happy Thanksgiving, dude.

In recasting the biblical Book of Job as a black comedy set in the American Midwest of 1967, the Coens have again used immortal source material to create a brilliantly realized 20th century farce. On some levels, "A Serious Man" resembles the brothers' earlier repackaging of "The Odyssey" into the raucous hillbilly saga "O Brother Where Art Thou?"

But where that Oscar-winning comedy followed the ancient Homeric template of arduous heroic quest ending in triumph and reconciliation, "A Serious Man" is about loss, loss and more loss. Not, you might suppose, the stuff of brilliant comedy.

Yet in the Coens' skilled hands, this tale of a Midwestern mensch forced by an ancestral curse to give up everything he has built his life upon belongs in the darkly hilarious company of "Doctor Strangelove," "Wag the Dog" and "The Loved One."

Without giving too much away, I think I can share this. Even when the Job character in "A Serious Man" has lost everything and hits rock bottom, there's somebody worse off than he is - his own invalid, lunatic brother.

"I have nothing! Nothing!" the lunatic brother sobs one night. He is seated in his underwear on the chipped cement steps of a drained motel swimming pool, his stout body heaving in abject despair. "You have everything!" he tells the protagonist accusingly. "A house, a family, a career, a future. I have nothing!"

The protagonist can't believe his ears. He's just lost his house and wrecked his car, is about to lose his job, has been exiled to a fleabag motel by his own wife and kids, and is about to get a diagnosis of abdominal cancer.

"I'm living at the Jolly Roger!" the protagonist shouts in exasperation, as if to say: What could be worse? But of course, the lunatic brother's situation is worse. Compared with him, the protagonist still has much to be thankful for. He just doesn't realize it.

The motel pool scene sold me on the movie, although many other scenes are equally compelling. I loved its artful weave of elements: misery, humor, compassion, sorrow, satire, pathos, irony, tragedy and hopelessness, all in four minutes of screen time.

If you're down and out this holiday season; if you feel you have little to be thankful for, watch "A Serious Man." It screens this week at the Queen Ka'ahumanu Center's Consolidated Theatres and again at 5 p.m. Dec. 16 in the Maui Arts & Cultural Center's Castle Theater.

You'll come out of there walking on air. Until then, happy Thanksgiving.

* Tom Stevens is a freelance writer whose "Shave Ice" column appears every Wednesday. Send e-mail to him at shaveicemaui@gmail.com.