Stiller & Meara Review: Nothing’s Lost – Ben Stiller’s poignant study of the price his family paid for the entertainment industry | film

forProjectSyndicate en Stiller has painted an unexpectedly sweet, tender, and poignant portrait of his parents, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara—and perhaps of himself, too, without quite realizing it. His mother and father were hard-working comedians, had a very successful TV double act in the 1960s and 1970s and a long marriage. This has been the source of much material, based on the quarrels and tensions to which Ben and his sister Amy were intimate witnesses.

Both parents had difficult backgrounds. Anne’s mother committed suicide. Jerry’s father was cruel and unsupportive. They may never have experienced the full stardom status their son enjoyed, though Jerry did get a new shot at TV fame late in life in the 1990s with his breakout portrayal of George Costanza’s father on Seinfeld. The film centers on Ben and Amy vacating their mother and father’s New York apartment after Jerry’s death in 2020; Anne died in 2015. Ben Stiller himself emerges as a complex and unresolved character from this film: he takes into account the fact that his parents were sometimes not there for him due to the pressures of show business, and that he himself was not there for his children due to his absences from sets. He and his wife, Christine Taylor, were separated for three years but reunited in 2020.

And Ben may have discovered something that Jerry and Myra had discovered – but they suppressed it and kept smiling like band members. Show business is a cruel profession not only because it takes you away from your family, but because it always promises a level of star ecstasy that is fleeting, or never arrives at all; Someone else is more successful than you, someone else has more awards, someone else’s project is being assigned to you. When Amy tells Ben on camera about how hard it was for her to work as a waitress while he was becoming a movie star, he can’t help but smile sadly.

There’s also an interesting and very revealing sketch that Ben did when he was a young child, based on family therapy sessions they had before, when the comically obnoxious Ben tells Jerry that the father is less popular than the son. Amy then irritates Ben with a story about wetting the bed. An interesting and bittersweet family study.