About halfway through his sentimental and ruminative documentary Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost, director Ben Stiller reveals that his parents––actors Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara––spent the majority of their life together sleeping in separate but adjoining bedrooms. It’s a small, casual detail that illuminates the pair’s personal and professional relationship––both inside the family’s cherished Upper West Side apartment and on TV screens across the country.
The husband-wife duo, whose comedy act rose to fame on talk shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s, appeared to be a model couple: close, joyful, successful. They also couldn’t have been more different. Stiller loved comedy and approached the craft with a perfectionist work ethic; Meara came from a drama background and leaned into freeform improvisation. As they raised a family, their renowned routine raised plenty questions about life behind closed doors. Were they happily married? How much of it was an act? And how did two competing, complementary artists stay together for so long?
When the elder Stiller died of natural causes in 2020, preceded five years earlier by Meara, the younger Stiller began interrogating these kinds of questions. The timing felt right. In the midst of the global pandemic he’d started to rekindle his relationship with his wife, actress Christine Taylor, and his two kids, who had moved back in together as a family. He also knew his parents’ apartment would eventually need to be cleaned and sold. The conflation of events and emotions led him to developing a project that could incorporate all of these conflicting feelings and curiosities. “I just felt out-of-balance and unhappy and kind of disconnected––from my family, from kids––and just kind of a little bit lost,” he says. “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.”
Starting and ending inside the family apartment, Stiller unearths a treasure trove of material with his elder sister Amy. Their father kept just about every photo, tape recording, and home video imaginable (hence the movie’s title), allowing them to rummage through memories and share anecdotes and collective history. In between recounting his parents’ backstories and dropping in archival sketches, Stiller documents aspects of his own career and family life, pulling on common threads––like the experience of performing at the Ed Sullivan Theater––as he tries making sense of their early family life together. At a time chock full of late celebrity documentaries, Stiller’s might initially come off as solipsistic––an exercise for him to tackle his grief and confusion rather than singularly tribute his mother and father with former collaborators and peers––but the more you understand the nature of their relationship and the parallels to Stiller’s own life, the more his unique, personal, and mosaic approach resonates and works as an artistic choice.
In that respect, Nothing is Lost feels like a living photo album, a loosely chronological collage scattered with inserts of vacations, random neighbors, audio recordings, and dinner table discussions. They don’t always fit together and sometimes sputter the movie’s momentum, but Stiller isn’t engaging in a slick, snappy hagiography. The mess of memory is kind of the point. Like any good historian, he runs through the evolution of their careers, sharing their banter and interplay in a variety of clips and noting their eventual move to Los Angeles to pursue sitcom work. But he’s also unafraid to interrogate the thornier aspects of his parents’ marriage––the older Stiller’s pressure-packed work ethic, or Meara’s battle with alcohol, or the couple’s persistent struggle with authenticity. As both Ben and Amy recall, it was often difficult to know whether their parents’ fights in another room were real or just preparation for an upcoming comedy sketch.
Stiller doesn’t exactly know how those blurred boundaries impacted him and Amy, but he acknowledges the way his parents’ celebrity and theater-kid personalities eventually paid dividends for his own comedy and acting career. As he highlights in various clips, Stiller frequently involved his whole family in video sketches and enlisted his mother to act beside him for his SNL audition tape. Their participation feels less like a calculated, nepotistic advantage than a group of caring comedy actors indulging their son in his pursuits. But Stiller’s ascent within his parents’ industry impacted Amy much harder, his burgeoning career casting a large shadow that became impossible to step out of. These admissions aren’t set up to be revelatory discoveries, but they further underline Stiller’s interest in grappling with the way that each of them experienced their parents’ love and attention in different ways.
Later in the documentary, Stiller also realizes just how little he’d learned from his father’s mistakes while raising his son, Quinn, and daughter, Ella, who unpack their own experiences growing up with actors for parents. These staged conversations first feel a little ornamental––a chance for Stiller to include his kids in a personal passion project with casual talk at the table or on the couch. But their presence becomes more integral with time. Both of his kids express the way it felt losing him to movie projects for long stretches (not unlike the younger Stiller with his father), trying to square the occupational hazards of having a popular comic actor for a dad. Quinn remembers one specific moment when Stiller excitedly shared he’d be leaving to make Night at the Museum 3. Because Quin loved those movies, Stiller assumed this was exciting news. Instead, he’s met with indifference. “I wish you could stay here,” Quinn remembers telling him.
It might have been enough for Stiller to turn this documentary into a clip show and interview some of his parents’ contemporaries––much as Colin Hanks recently did with John Candy: I Like Me. But that would have failed to capture the intricacies and contradictions of two married artists and the ripple effects of their love and professions. What makes this feel like a worthy endeavor is the extent to which Stiller is willing to be vulnerable and interrogate his own role within his family––the way he admits to holding his parents’ best and worst qualities, and how he desires to build a better version of himself. He doesn’t have many answers, but the documentary is a promising start.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost premiered at NYFF, opens in theaters on October 17, and arrives on Apple TV+ on October 24.