Stiller and Meara, as comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were known, were married for over 60 years, through times of great success (dozens of appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show) and periods when they could only book game shows, with similar high and low points as showbiz parents.
After Jerry passed away in 2020, a few years after Anne, Ben Stiller and his sister Amy had to sell the family apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, which is part of the impetus to Ben deciding to do the documentary Stiller And Meara: Nothing Is Lost, now on Apple TV+.
Stiller had also already been going through his own personal reckoning after his mother’s death, professionally on top as an A-list actor, but separated from his teenage children and wife of more than 15 years, Christine Taylor. As he explains, turning the camera on himself, “I felt out of balance, unhappy and disconnected from my family.”
Stiller incorporates considerable footage of his parents on chat shows like Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas in the 70s, as well as some of Stiller and Meara’s famous routines on Ed Sullivan (The Computer Dating Match between Jewish Hershey Horowitz and Catholic Mary Elizabeth Doyle, just as Stiller and Meara were in real life). But much more important and notable is the trove of cassette recordings his father made of conversations, sketch rehearsals, fights and professions of love between him and Meara over the decades. Luckily for his son, despite the protests and exasperation of Meara (and Ben and Amy), Jerry was a documentarian (he also filmed home movies of the family), archivist and hoarder, never throwing anything away.
Not surprisingly, Ben, who received his first Super 8 camera and editing equipment from his father, turned to directing and creating (Escape At Dannemora; Severance). The recordings – and the documentary – make for a warm, insightful and funny chronicle of a classic comedy partnership, a lengthy marriage both loving and fraught due to career tensions, and the reverberations for the next generations.
Like his parents in those many hours of recordings, Stiller is unfailingly open, talking about his mother’s alcoholism, his father’s insatiable need to work and get attention, or them being elsewhere during much of his and Amy’s childhoods. He and Amy were largely looked after by a long-time nanny, and that absence left a deep mark on him. But he found himself failing in the same way when his children were young, going off alone for months to make movies. Poignantly, he recounts his adult daughter recently telling him she didn’t remember him being around at all when she was a kid.
I would have been interested to see a project just about Stiller and Meara’s professional lives (when they pursued paths independent of each other after a decade performing together; Meara did theatre and straight dramas, and Stiller found work in movies and later on sitcoms like Seinfeld). But it’s devastating reveals like that and everyone’s willingness to share (it’s really a family affair with Taylor, their children, and his sister Amy interviewed) that make for such compelling viewing. In a little over 90 minutes, Stiller has created a terrific, loving tribute to Stiller and Meara’s legacy as comedians and performers, as well as the cautionary tale of growing up in a showbiz family.