Ben Stiller remembers the day he told his son Quin — then only eight or nine years old — that he had to go to Canada for a few months to shoot 2014’s “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third and most recent installment of the popular children’s franchise. Little Quin pleaded with his dad to stay home, as any kid would upon learning that their father was about to make another Shawn Levy movie, to which a mealy-mouthed Stiller replied: “But you Loven ‘Night at the Museum.’”
In a vacuum, it might be hard to appreciate how that story made its way into the searching and poignant new documentary that Stiller has made about his own parents, the renowned comedy duo of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. In the context of “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” however, it’s all too easy to understand why such a brutal aside is one of the film’s most important scenes.
A far cry from the rose-colored Apple TV tribute we might expect a celebrity to assemble from old clips of the “Ed Sullivan Show” and copious amounts of home video footage (it turns out that Jerry recorded everything he could, hoarding his memories for an unspoken purpose that he ultimately bequeathed to his kids), Stiller’s film is less a look back than it is a look inward; as much a loving showbiz eulogy as it is a multi-generational meditation on the relationship between public success and private failure. It’s a film made by someone who followed so closely in his parents’ footsteps that he always assumed he’d be able to compensate for his parents’ misstepsonly to realize — as many of us do to one degree or another — that doing “better” than they did is a lot harder than it looks.
Retroactively gracious by way of self-excoriation, “Nothing Is Lost” offers all of the biographical detail and archival video you would ever hope to see from a project like this one, but it doesn’t start with paying homage, it starts with Stiller wondering how his parents — for all of their foibles and faults — stayed together for more than half a century while he and Christine Taylor separated after just 17 years (still an eternity by celebrity standards).
Jerry was an uptight Jewish perfectionist who sweated every detail of their comedy act, and entrusted too much of his self-worth to the state of his career; he could be distant from his kids, but would drop everything to make small talk with an eager fan. An “Irish princess from Long Island,” Anne was lighter towards her talent, and had more of it, but she was also prone to a despair that her job could not solve; while she found more joy in the work than Jerry ever did, she was less satisfied by it as well, and often drank herself to a dangerous state no matter how many laughs she got. If those two were able to stick it out through all that, what does it say that Stiller and Taylor couldn’t survive “Zoolander 2?”
The recently orphaned “Severance” director forces himself to confront that question — or at least a lightly veiled iteration of it — as he and his sister Amy begin to clean out their childhood apartment on Riverside Drive, a process of manufactured closure that represents Stiller’s last best chance of reconciling who his parents were at home with the comic duo they played on TV. He certainly knows from experience how impossible it would be to unbraid the two, and “Nothing Is Lost” is compellingly bound together by the sense that Stiller had to make it in order to achieve a meaningful amount of closure; that his family’s collective screen image was the only lens through which he could ever hope to see either of his parents clearly, or to recognize which of their roles he’s come to reprise in his own life.
To that end, Stiller creates a memory palace of a movie that balances the fastidiousness he inherited from his father with the improvisational charm that he picked up from his mom. Interviews — most of them with Taylor or their two mostly grown kids, though luminaries like Christopher Walken show up whenever they have a certain light to shed — are staged with a stiffness that belies how freely they’re conducted, so that even the rare moments that don’t have anything to do with showbiz manage to blur the line between real life and what’s on camera (Amy is as relaxed and camera-friendly as it gets, but she almost immediately jokes about how the whole thing is a set-up).
Of course, that line has been fuzzy since “Benji” Stiller was a kid, as he and his sister would often join their parents during their variety show appearances, and Jerry was always rolling his 8mm at home and on family vacations. Stiller mentions a trip to see a bullfight in Spain, and sure enough we’re treated to footage of young Stiller yelling at a bullfighter from the stands. Did he cite that trip because he knew he had the visual aid to support it on screen, or does he only remember that trip because his dad captured it on film and left the footage to rot in a closet?
It’s hard to say, and Stiller himself might not even know for sure. The only certainty is that he’s fascinated with the extent to which people are shaped by the images they project of themselves into the world, and haunted by the notion that his parents needed to complement each other in order to seem complete — that their chemistry on camera made it difficult for them to function as individuals at home.
The film eventually exalts in the success that Jerry and Anne both found on their own (she on stage, and he on “Seinfeld”), but “Nothing Is Lost” is far more engaged in diagnosing the problems of their dynamic than it is in addressing how they weathered them. Stiller finds plenty of love and tenderness throughout the years, but weathering problems is most of what a long marriage is, and eventually his father stopped recording the footage that a film like this would need to offer this story a more satisfying resolution than death.
The fact that Stiller reunited with Taylor during the pandemic might have provided the sense of an ending (it’s easy to imagine how a more opportunistic film might have allowed the director to find a clear “lesson” from the tapes that Jerry left behind), but Stiller is only willing to crack open so much of his life for our viewing pleasure. “Nothing Is Lost” is more for him than it is for us, and so “in for a penny, in for a pound” doesn’t seem to apply.
We know that he was feeling low and lost after his father died, and that the afterimage of his parents’ marriage played some kind of a role in his decision to bring his own family back together, but the details are frustratingly few and far between. Of course, life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he’s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he could ever have paid to his parents’ legacy.
Grade: B
“Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost” will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, October 24.
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