Biography, autobiography and Apple-supported family therapy come together in Ben Stiller‘s uneven but potent documentary, Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, premiering at the New York Film Festival ahead of a launch on Apple TV+ later this month.
Easily Stiller’s most personal film as a director, it works as an interesting complement to Mariska Hargitay’s recent HBO documentary, My Mom Jayne, in which the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star and director explored gaps in her own identity through the public image and private artifacts of the mother she never really knew.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
The Bottom Line
Personal and poignant.
Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight)
Airdate: Friday, Oct. 24 (Apple TV+)
Director: Ben Stiller
1 hour 38 minutes
In Nothing Is Lost, Stiller uses the public image and private artifacts of the parents he and the world knew quite well, pondering the gap between public and private, along with his own difficulties following in his parents’ footsteps as an artist, a spouse and a father.
I think there’s a perfectly fair reading of Nothing Is Lost, especially from fans of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, that the couple deserved an exploratory showcase that isn’t 50 percent about their son’s own neuroses. But ultimately I think there’s sadness and humor to Ben Stiller’s approach, which blends tonal traces of previous collaborators Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.
Stiller is well-aware of the solipsism within this process that is, allegedly, documenting somebody else’s life. The project arose, he admits, from a moment in 2020 after the death of his father, which was preceded five years earlier by his mother’s passing.
“I just felt out of balance and unhappy and kinda disconnected — from my family, from kids — and just kinda a little bit lost. And I started to think about my parents and all the stress and tension I remember seeing as a kid and the pressure when they were working together and how they stayed together through it,” Stiller says.
The film’s title refers to both the sense of nihilism that struck Stiller in the heart of the global pandemic (which simultaneously ended a period of estrangement in his own marriage to actress Christine Taylor) and to his father’s tendencies as a collector.
As the documentary begins, Ben Stiller, sister Amy Stiller and Dawn Eaton, former assistant to Anne and Jerry, are going through the family’s longtime apartment, filled ephemerally with memories and concretely with box after box of newspaper clippings, saved correspondences and cassette tapes that Jerry recorded over decades. The collecting stems from Jerry’s pride toward his family, his love for Anne and, in early phases, how many aspects from their real marriage became part of Stiller & Meara sketches.
Ben explains to Amy that the project he’s making, shot by his Escape at Dannemora and Severance cinematographer Jessica Lee Gagné, will be built around the selling of the apartment, but the actual clearing and selling are left for a poignant coda.
Instead, the documentary starts with them reflecting on the debris of their parents’ 60+ year marriage as a way of tracing their lives and careers. This includes watching the sketches Stiller & Meara performed on countless talk shows, critiquing their respective styles and pondering how much or little from their seemingly candid appearances and interviews was meant to be taken as truth and not performance. The siblings go through old pictures, watch old Super 8 footage and even read to each other from surprisingly graphic letters between their parents, expressing involuntary waves of horror and pride at how horny Jerry and Anne were for each other.
Nothing Is Lost doesn’t go deeply into the context of Stiller & Meara’s particular brand of ’60s and ’70s stardom, a partner style that had decades in vogue from vaudeville through early television and has basically vanished today, but the clips from The Ed Sullivan Show and The Mike Douglas Show capture their rhythms and energy. Several of those clips include discussions of and then appearances by young Amy and young Ben, a natural catalyst for Ben’s own introspection.
Without airing too much of his parents’ dirty laundry, Stiller looks at the imperfections in a marriage that was, in many ways, idealized in the public eye, delving into Anne and Jerry’s shared aspirations and the ones they maintained as individuals, and where “family” ranked in those aspirations. This leads him to consider his own failings and successes in marrying a fellow performer and occasional colleague, what he learned from his parents in terms of prioritizing children and the mistakes he realizes he’s made over the years.
Helping Ben Stiller go on this journey are Taylor, their daughter Ella and their son Quin, who all handle their presence in the camera in different ways.
Taylor thinks it’s important to bring up stories related to Anne and Jerry, but while Ben doesn’t hesitate to talk about their pre-pandemic separation, she doesn’t think this is her place for candor. Quin, now 20, sees what Ben is attempting and mostly nods, but he admits that in his youth, he rarely felt high on Ben’s priority list. Ella, now 23, is more playful and more willing to joke about things like getting cut from The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. She and her father both laugh about it, even if you sense it hasn’t always been a source of humor for her.
It’s a delicate line that Amy also walks on several occasions, as she remembers the years she struggled as a waitress when Ben’s star was ascending. It’s a thing they chuckle about now, although Ben doesn’t quite know how to respond.
It’s that uncertainty that keeps Nothing Is Lost from feeling insufferable. If Ben Stiller had directed this documentary like a man who had had uncertainties and found smug validation by going through his parents’ stuff, it would have just evaporated into the ether. Instead, his exercise reminds him that, however famously polished his parents were, however impressive the duration of their marriage, it’s worth remembering the effort and imperfections and inconsistencies as well, so that nothing is lost.
#Ben #Stillers #Apple #Doc
