Ben Stiller remembers the day he told his son Quin — then just eight or nine years old — that he had to go to Canada for a few months to film 2014’s “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,” the third and latest installment of the popular children’s series. Little Quin pleaded with his father to stay home, as any child would when he was told that their father was about to make another Shawn Levy film, to which a floury Stiller replied: “But you Love “Night at the Museum.”
In a vacuum, it can be hard to understand how that story found its way into the searching and poignant new documentary Stiller has made about his own parents, the famous comedy duo Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. In the context of Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost, however, it is all too easy to understand why such a brutal side is one of the films most important scenes.
Far from rosy Apple TV homage that we might expect a celebrity to gather from old “Ed Sullivan Show” clips and copious amounts of home video footage (it turns out that Jerry recorded everything he could and collected his memories for an unspoken purpose that he ultimately bequeathed to his children), Stiller’s film is less a retrospective than it is a look back; as much an affectionate showbiz eulogy as it is a multigenerational meditation on the relationship between public success and private failure. It’s a movie made by someone who followed in his parents’ footsteps so closely that he always assumed he could make up for his parents’ missteponly to realize – as so many of us do to one degree or another – that doing “better” than they did is a lot harder than it looks.
Retroactively gracious in the form of self-excoriation, “Nothing Is Lost” offers all the biographical detail and archival footage you’d ever hope to see from a project like this, but it doesn’t start with tributes, it starts with Stiller wondering how his parents — for all their flaws and faults — stuck together for more than half a century. 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 and entrusted too much of his self-worth to his career; he could be distant from his children, but would drop everything to chat with an eager fan. An “Irish princess from Long Island,” Anne was lighter on her talent and had more of it, but she was also prone to a despair that her job couldn’t solve; while she found more joy in the work than Jerry ever did, she was also less satisfied with it, often drinking herself to a dangerous state no matter how many laughs she got. If those two could persevere through all that, what’s to say 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 — when he and his sister Amy begin cleaning out their childhood apartment on Riverside Drive, a process of manufactured closure that represents Stiller’s last best chance to reconcile 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 untangle the two, and “Nothing Is Lost” is convincingly bound by the sense that Stiller had to do so 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 has come to re-enact in his own life.
To that end, Stiller creates a memory palace of a film that balances the fastidiousness he inherited from his father with the improvisational charm he gleaned from his mother. Interviews – most of them with Taylor or their two mostly grown children, though luminaries like Christopher Walken appear when they have some light to shed – are staged with a stiffness that belies how freely they’re performed, so that even the rare moments that have nothing to do with showbiz manage to blur the line between real life and what’s on camera, and how friendly the camera almost becomes casual (Amy-but jokes almost immediately). it’s all a setup).
Of course, that line has been blurred since “Benji” Stiller was a child, as he and his sister often joined his parents during their variety shows, and Jerry always rolled his 8mm at home and on family vacations. Stiller mentions a trip to see a bullfight in Spain, and sure enough we are treated to images of young Stiller yelling at a toreador 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 caught 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 is fascinated by the extent to which people are shaped by the images they project of themselves in the world, and haunted by the notion that his parents needed to complement each other in order to appear complete – that their on-camera chemistry made it difficult for them to function as individuals at home.
The film eventually celebrates the success Jerry and Anne both found on their own (she on stage, he on “Seinfeld”), but “Nothing Is Lost” is far more concerned with diagnosing the problems with their dynamic than addressing how they managed them. Stiller finds plenty of love and tenderness over the years, but weather problems are most of what a long marriage is, and eventually his father stops shooting the footage that a movie like this would need to give this story a more satisfying resolution than death.
The fact that Stiller reunited with Taylor during the pandemic may have given the sense of closure (it’s easy to imagine how a more opportunistic film might have allowed the director to find a clear “lesson” from the tapes 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 to him than it is to us, and so “in for a penny, in for a pound” doesn’t seem to apply.
We know that he felt low and lost after his father died, and that the aftermath of his parents’ marriage played some sort of role in his decision to bring his own family back together, but details are frustratingly few and far between. Of course, life and art will always be more closely intertwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he has at least learned to be aware of it is perhaps as moving 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 beginning Friday, October 24.
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