Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost
Ben Stiller (2025)
The title characters met and married in 1953. They stayed married until Anne Meara’s death in 2015; Jerry Stiller died five years later. Their son Ben’s marriage, to fellow actor Christine Taylor in 2000, lasted seventeen years before they separated. In the year his father died, the pair moved back in together, with their two children, as a COVID bubble. During that time, they reconciled and Stiller began developing this documentary feature. Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost is always absorbing, yet it seems to have been made by and present people who, despite being public performers, have always lived in a bubble. And although it lovingly commemorates his parents, the film is too much about Ben Stiller himself.
On this side of the Atlantic at least, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara are much less famous than their son. I recognised their names and faces without being able to place them in any cinema film I’d seen (though it turns out I’d seen them in several[1]). They became best known to American audiences in other contexts, first as a regular comedy duo on The Ed Sullivan Show during the 1960s, when they also worked the clubs circuit. They went their separate ways professionally at the turn of the decade, but it’s clear from Nothing is Lost that they were still often TV talk-show guests as a couple. In the 1970s, Anne Meara appeared Off Broadway in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, as well as in TV dramas and sitcoms. Most British viewers familiar with Jerry Stiller will know him for his 1990s role in Seinfeld (which I never have seen).
In work and in life Stiller and Meara were a chalk-and-cheese partnership. He was short, Jewish, vaudeville-based, determined to be funny, always desperate for audience approval. She was tall, Irish-Catholic, ambitious to be a straight actress yet a more naturally gifted comedian than her husband and more easily able to improvise. As parents, according to Ben, his father was more tender and better at coping with a crisis than his mother. While Anne smoked and drank too much, Jerry was obsessed with memorabilia, especially audio recordings. Although you’re never in doubt that the central couple loved each other devotedly, these tapes are as likely to include marital disputes as happy family memories, and they turn out to be a mixed blessing in the film. They guarantee that, in conjunction with abundant TV clips, the narrative is fast-paced and revealing. They’re a potent expression of how a private relationship fed professional comedy routines and personas. After a while, though, the recordings start to feel like a nearly pathological pas de deux (Anne knew that Jerry was regularly taping their exchanges).
For this viewer/listener, the endless supply of home movies and conversations was too relentless – even though it’s understandably an endless source of fascination to Ben Stiller and his sister, Amy (herself a successful actor and stand-up, though some way down the celebrity food chain from her brother or their parents). Most sons and daughters are probably insatiable when it comes to finding out what their parents said when they weren’t there. Sometimes the kids were there. At one point in the film, Anne Meara recalls the infant Amy, hearing raised voices and coming anxiously into the room where Anne and Jerry were running lines. They reassured Amy that ‘Mommy-Daddy rehearsing’. Not long afterwards, she interrupted another argument and trotted out that phrase; this time, though, the fight was for real. You laugh at this illustration of art imitating life and vice versa in the Stillers’ New York City apartment. Yet as Nothing is Lost proceeds, its all-in-the-family set-up becomes oppressive.
This impression could be magnified by how and when the film originated, but the Covid era can only partly explain it (especially since the film wasn’t released until last year). Apart from people who pop up briefly in TV, cinema and theatre clips, only two talking heads – John Guare and Christopher Walken, who make refreshing contributions – are not members of the Stiller family. Otherwise, the cast comprises Jerry, Anne, Jerry’s sister, Amy, Ben, his wife Christine and their two children, Ella and Quin. We hear, as well as Jerry’s recordings, extracts from theatre pieces that Anne wrote, read aloud by Amy and Ben. (The film takes its subtitle from both sources. ‘Nothing is lost’, because Jerry has retained or recorded everything, is also a line in Anne’s After Play.) We learn, too, about psychotherapy sessions – for Jerry and Anne individually and as a couple, and as family outings, with Amy and Ben joining in. This comes across as a near-parody of a New York Jewish-Catholic showbiz family of the later twentieth century – therapy as routine rather than compelled by a persisting need for help. It wouldn’t be fair to disparage the film as merely repetitive because it continues to probe deeper into what made Stiller & Meara tick – revealing, for example, that Anne’s mother committed suicide when her daughter was only eleven – but it is narrow.
I’ve nearly always enjoyed Ben Stiller as a performer. Here I found him increasingly uncomfortable to watch. Perhaps the warning signs are there from the self-referential start of Nothing is Lost. He and Amy are in the family apartment they grew up in, preparing to sort out their father’s stuff before selling the place. Ben asks Amy – but really himself – how is he going to make this documentary and witters on about cinéma vérité. A bit later, he recalls missing his parents when they were away working and says he was determined, once his own career took off, not to repeat the mistakes Jerry and Anne made in putting work before family. He eventually admits he probably did a worse job in this respect yet still doesn’t seem to understand why: it’s hard to fathom how such a bright, self-critical man can’t seem to grasp that regularly bringing Ella and Quin along to the set of his latest movie, in effect reinforced his order of priorities.
His daughter and son, both now in their early twenties, are open and likeable, as is Christine Taylor. It may be that Ben Stiller means to stress how undeservingly lucky he is to have them all, but does he mean to give the impression that he does give, as his wife and children make affectionate criticisms of what he was like when Ella and Quin were growing up? He nods his head, murmurs assent, never argues with what they say. Yet he doesn’t really seem to be listening either. He comes across as someone too familiar with, and going through the motions of, the talking cure.
15 June 2026
[1] Jerry Stiller in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Airport 1975 (1974) and Hairspray (2007); Anne Meara in Awakenings (1990); both of them in their son’s Zoolander (2001).