A recent trend in documentary filmmaking has interview subjects being filmed as they are being set up to be filmed. Consider it an added bit of verisimilitude: this has to be the real deal, because this is a raw moment of someone unused to the camera getting mic’d up, or else adjusting their clothes as they settle into the H๏τ seat. No doubt exacerbated by Netflix’s H๏τ-off-the-presses spate of docuseries about this or that murder, the effect is only sporadically warranted. But in Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, Ben Stiller may be going for something else: bare honesty, filtered through the notion that any and all recorded moments are potentially valuable.
The approach is no doubt inspired by his own subject, his parents, Anne Meara & Jerry Stiller, whose longtime comic act prevailed through decades of changes in entertainment. Jerry was an incessant recorder; amongst the mᴀssive treasure trove of home media in their Upper West Side apartment was box upon box of taped conversations. Ben and his sister, actress Amy Stiller, were tasked with selling the home after Jerry’s death in 2020 (five years after Anne), and, in the process of sorting through these archival materials, Ben began to interrogate a lifetime lived in the shadow of comic and romantic greatness.
Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost Is Both A Loving Portrait & A Process of Self-Interrogation
Jerry and Anne met in 1956, and their comic act was borne as much out of their natural repartee as a desire to create the career for themselves that Hollywood had otherwise been unwilling to grant. A borscht-belt routine of moderately staged sketches, their work propelled them to prominence through repeated appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. They milked as much as they could from their personal lives, especially their surface-level differences: him, a short Jew, her, a tall Irish Catholic. Peas-in-a-pod whose silliness was only matched by the other.
About their partnership, Jerry once remarked that, “very few people are able to find in each other what they dreamed about as kids.” Stiller & Meara is packed with these cogently beautiful reflections on an uncommon partnership, and Ben’s mission is, more or less, a “project of understanding how they did it.” The “it” here is shifty. At times, Ben seems to mean their illustrious career, at others their love for each other, still at others their ability to parent effectively, and it is perhaps the conclusion left to be made that these branches are interchangeable.
The film is best as an archival project in cinematic tapestry-weaving. Armed with a vast array of domestic footage, audio recordings, and no shortage of television interviews, Stiller and editor Adam Kurnitz (Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground) put together a rare, insightful portrait of a singular comedic duo. But Stiller has something of a secret, secondary mission, which is to interrogate his own success as a parent, and whether he has ever been able to truly shirk off the shadow of Jerry and Anne.
Kurnitz utilizes frequent match cuts and layering to make this question even more alive, as when we see Ben getting ready to appear on Stephen Colbert at the same time we see his parents preparing for their first time on The Late Show. Ben admirably gives his own kids, Quin and Ella, platforms to honestly share about his shortcomings. Ella mentions that she has “no memory” of Ben as a father during her childhood, a startling confession that shocks him, and which has him realizing in real time that some pitfalls are impossible to miss when living a life amidst the specter of Hollywood.
Of the many lessons Ben seems to be taking from his parents, even still after their deaths, is that a life worth living cannot be achieved solely through careerism. In one tape, his mother protests to Jerry that, “There has to be some way you can get an authentic sense of yourself without worrying how you’re going to be perceived. It is joyless. Absolutely joyless.” As Ben ponders whether he has avoided this absolutism, a question hangs over the entire film: are the perils of life in the spotlight worth it?
Because of its intense focus on Ben’s personal life, the film does frequently tip into navel-gazing in a way that really detracts from the portraiture of Anne and Jerry. There’s nothing truly revelatory here, and in the moments that Ben and Amy complain about their parents’ mistakes, it feels out of touch with reality. Yet, the film is so well put together, constructed with such warmth, that it does paper over its own indulgence.
The subтιтle, which refers to Anne Meara’s play After-Play, has a double meaning about the way we choose to remember. In a world of more and more digitization and the departure from physical media, are we at risk of forgetting our day-to-day? And what mistakes are we bound to repeat? With any luck, we’ll at least be able to make some people laugh along the way.
