TV Review
Ben Stiller Had Issues With His Parents. So He Made a Doc About Them
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost is a tribute, a therapy session, and a look at balancing professional and personal lives that sometimes gets brutal
Long before Frank “Serenity Now!” Costanza on Seinfeld. And there’s Ben’s mother Anne Meara, who wrote plays, acted in everything from TV sitcoms to Shakespeare in the Park productions, and always preferred her son’s more serious work to his broader, big-budget laugh riots.
Because Meara never wanted to become one half of a world-famous duo that would play The Ed Sullivan Show close to 40 times and helped revolutionize how gender dynamics worked in mid-20th century comedy acts. She aspired to be the second coming of Sarah Bernhardt, or the 1950s equivalent of Meryl Streep. But then this tall “Irish princess from Long Island” met Jerry Stiller, a short Polish-American Jew from the Lower East Side, and he immediately realized that, in addition to being gorgeous and strong-willed, his future wife was also hilarious. Jerry convinced Anne to help him craft a double act that made the most of their different backgrounds, different heights, different personalities, and different perspectives on life. And soon after that first appearance on the Sullivan show, Stiller & Meara became a household name, a constant presence on talk shows and the club circuit, and beloved by many. Including Ben and Amy, who found they were vying with millions of Stiller & Meara fans for their parents’ attention.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (now streaming on Apple TV) starts out as something like a memorial, with Ben and his sister returning to the Manhattan apartment on 84th and Riverside that they grew up in. Meara died in 2015; Jerry passed away five years later. Their kids have come to clean the place up, put it on the market and say goodbye. This was where they were raised, where the future Reality Bites director would goof around with the other kids in their building and shoot their escapades with a Super 8 Canon his dad bought him. You can never truly go home again, but you can sit on the couch where you once watched your parents’ performances on television and sift through a lifetime’s worth of photos, old letters, scripts, and scrapbooks.
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Ben, however, decided to bring cameras along to capture everything — “it was my first instinct,” he admits, “because that’s what my dad always did.” The elder Stiller was an amateur auteur with a bit of a hoarder’s mentality when it came to documentation, constantly filming home movies of his kids. He also incessantly taped private conversations and professional improvisations with his wife-slash-comedic partner, both of which would figure in their bits. “Where does the act end and the marriage begin?” Meara asks, complicating the matter further by wondering this inquiry aloud while the two of them are chatting with Mike Douglas on his daytime show. It wasn’t that the line between the life and work were blurred. It was more like: What do you mean by “line?”
This was the old normal for Ben, a comfortable innie-outie melding of creative and family lives, until it wasn’t — and isn’t. And here’s where Nothing Is Lost gets really knotty, extremely meta, and very, very interesting. Stiller could have kept this at the level of a fond look back, with him and Amy reminiscing about their late, great folks, and honoring the groundbreaking work they did. Remember the classic “computer dating” sketch? And the one about the last two people on Earth, except y’know, she’s not really feeling his repopulating vibe? You’ll get to see those vintage clips, along with a lot of ready-for-primetime banter and the many times that young Benji and Amy were paraded for studio audiences and encouraged to be precocious for laughs. There are more polyester outfits per capita than any other celebrity-directed doc this year. A nostalgia festivus for the rest of us!
Then those cameras get turned on the person behind them, and we see how maybe growing up in a family in which Mom and Dad were famous, and constantly having intense arguments behind closed office doors that might be real or merely rehearsals, had its share of setbacks. The dynamic between Anne and Jerry fed their act and also fueled their IRL problems, like her excessive drinking and his need for attention. They loved each other. Also: ambition and restlessness mixed with animosity and resentment. (“I was a good actress before I met you,” Meara says at one point to her spouse, and that’s maybe only the seventh most brutal exchange you hear in the film.) Both kids were clocking everything, and absorbing a few lessons that would help and hinder them down the line.
It isn’t inevitable that people become their parents, or some version of them spiced with a number of natural personality quirks mixed in with the wonderful-to-warping effects of nurturing. But when Ben starts hearing from his own kids about how he wasn’t around as much as they wished, and how fatherhood may have taken second place to his career, you start to see how the complaints he had about his parents are now being echoed back to him. The cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, etc. Stiller and his wife Christine Taylor had separated from each other in 2017, before getting back together several years later (thank you for at least one thing, Covid!). How much the conversations we see between them about his need to succeed, and the mindset he replicated from Mom and Dad after they view old footage together, contributed to the marital healing process is purely speculative. But you can guess the percentage is larger than zero.
Nothing Is Lost takes its subtitle from Jerry, who’s talking to his father on tape and waxing poetic about why he pathologically tries to capture even the most mundane parts of life in media amber. By the end, the resonance of naming the movie after that remark takes on more layers than a seven-year-old Benji Stiller sliding down a snowy hill in Central Park. What starts off as a tribute turns into an autopsy of a long marriage as seen by the kids who witnessed the best and worst of it, done with humor, anger, hindsight, and empathy. Then it makes a hard left and examines the way that legacies, even ones with the best intentions, have a way of shaping us and sometimes setting us back and always, always leaving us with lessons to repeat or refute. Perhaps nothing truly is lost. What’s more important is that when it comes to family, all — or at least as close to all as possible — is eventually forgiven.
