In a clip — apparently of 1970s vintage — shown in “Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,” a young Ben Stiller is seen being interviewed alongside his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, who rose to fame as a joint comedy act. If Ben (Benji then) were a producer, the interviewer asks, would he hire his mother and father? “No,” he replies. Gesturing toward his parents, he adds, with a hint of mischief in his voice, “It’d be hard to work with you.”
Ben more than makes amends for that gibe in this charming documentary, which is not merely an introduction to Stiller and Meara — as a routine and as a couple — but also a memoir of what it was like to grow up in the public eye. Their two children, Ben and his older sister, Amy, were in the spotlight from an early age, and that experience left them with plenty of footage to draw on. (Ben started to shoot his own movies in childhood; when Jerry appeared in “Airport 1975,” Ben remade it as “Airport ’76.”)
It turns out that Jerry, who died in 2020, five years after Anne, was a pack rat when it came to keeping audiotapes of his life. We’re told that Anne used to say that the recordings would just pile up when he died, and while “she wasn’t wrong,” Ben notes, the process of selling the Upper West Side apartment where he and Amy grew up gives them an opportunity to listen.
At least two ideas running through “Nothing Is Lost,” which is streaming on Apple TV, and which takes its title from a line in a play that Anne wrote, give it a complexity that usually eludes profile-of-an-artist documentaries. One is the tension between Jerry and Anne’s onstage chemistry and their private lives. They were married people who played romantic partners, and having their careers bound together that way sometimes proved less than ideal.
Ben and Amy recall that, when they overheard heated moments between their parents, the line between rehearsals and fights was often difficult to discern. We learn that the two comics approached their work quite differently. Jerry was a stickler for preparation, Anne less so. Jerry found contentment with comedy, while Anne longed to make it as a serious actress and sought success off-Broadway. (Another great clip of Ben in boyhood shows him ostensibly giving playwright John Guare notes on a script.)
The other through line is that Ben begins to see similarities between his upbringing and how he has raised his own children. His son, Quin, notes that he has a penchant for getting trapped inside his own head, a trait he would seem to share with Jerry. (Ben and Amy agree that a lot of the pent-up frustration their father felt found an outlet in the Frank Costanza character on “Seinfeld.”) And while some of the intra-family chats can seem self-indulgent or repetitive, there is real poignancy in hearing Amy, an actress herself, talk about the years she waited tables while her brother was becoming famous.
Ben is credited as the movie’s director, but he includes a “film by” credit that lists his loved ones. That feels fitting.
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‘Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost’
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Apple TV.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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