{"id":234776,"date":"2025-10-23T16:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T16:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/234776\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T16:10:13","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T16:10:13","slug":"ben-stillers-apple-tv-doc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/234776\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Stiller’s Apple TV Doc"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ben Stiller<\/a> remembers the day he told his son Quin \u2014\u00a0then only eight or nine years old \u2014 that he had to go to Canada for a few months to shoot 2014\u2019s \u201cNight at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb,\u201d the third and most recent installment of the popular children\u2019s franchise. Little Quin pleaded with his dad to stay home, as any kid would upon learning that their father was about to make another Shawn Levy<\/a> movie, to which a mealy-mouthed Stiller replied: \u201cBut you love \u2018Night at the Museum.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a vacuum, it might be hard to appreciate how that story made its way into the searching and poignant new documentary that Stiller has made about his own parents, the renowned comedy duo of Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. In the context of \u201cStiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost,\u201d however, it\u2019s all too easy to understand why such a brutal aside is one of the film<\/a>\u2019s most important scenes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'Bunny'\"<\/a> \""Chainsaw<\/a> <\/p>\n

A far cry from the rose-colored Apple TV<\/a> tribute we might expect a celebrity to assemble from old clips of the \u201cEd Sullivan Show\u201d and copious amounts of home video footage (it turns out that Jerry recorded everything he could, hoarding his memories for an unspoken purpose that he ultimately bequeathed to his kids), Stiller\u2019s film is less a look back than it is a look inward; as much a loving showbiz eulogy as it is a multi-generational meditation on the relationship between public success and private failure. It\u2019s a film made by someone who followed so closely in his parents\u2019 footsteps that he always assumed he\u2019d be able to compensate for his parents\u2019 missteps, only to realize \u2014\u00a0as so many of us do to one degree or another \u2014\u00a0that doing \u201cbetter\u201d than they did is a lot harder than it looks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Retroactively gracious by way of self-excoriation, \u201cNothing Is Lost\u201d offers all of the biographical detail and archival video you would ever hope to see from a project like this one, but it doesn\u2019t start with paying homage, it starts with Stiller wondering how his parents \u2014\u00a0for all of their foibles and faults \u2014\u00a0stayed together for more than half a century while he and Christine Taylor<\/a> separated after just 17 years (still an eternity by celebrity standards).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jerry was an uptight Jewish perfectionist who sweated every detail of their comedy act, and entrusted too much of his self-worth to the state of his career; he could be distant from his kids, but would drop everything to make small talk with an eager fan. An \u201cIrish princess from Long Island,\u201d Anne was lighter towards her talent, and had more of it, but she was also prone to a despair that her job couldn\u2019t solve; while she found more joy in the work than Jerry ever did, she was less satisfied by it as well, and often drank herself to a dangerous state no matter how many laughs she got. If those two were able to stick it out through all that, what does it say that Stiller and Taylor couldn\u2019t survive \u201cZoolander 2?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The recently orphaned \u201cSeverance\u201d director forces himself to confront that question \u2014 or at least a lightly veiled iteration of it \u2014 as he and his sister Amy begin to clean out their childhood apartment on Riverside Drive, a process of manufactured closure that represents Stiller\u2019s last best chance of reconciling 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 unbraid the two, and \u201cNothing Is Lost\u201d is compellingly bound together by the sense that Stiller had to make it in order to achieve a meaningful amount of closure; that his family\u2019s 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\u2019s come to reprise in his own life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To that end, Stiller creates a memory palace of a movie that balances the fastidiousness he inherited from his father with the improvisational charm that he picked up from his mom. Interviews \u2014\u00a0most of them with Taylor or their two mostly grown kids, though luminaries like Christopher Walken show up whenever they have a certain light to shed \u2014 are staged with a stiffness that belies how freely they\u2019re conducted, so that even the rare moments that don\u2019t have anything to do with showbiz manage to blur the line between real life and what\u2019s on camera (Amy is as relaxed and camera-friendly as it gets, but she almost immediately jokes about how the whole thing is a set-up).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, that line has been fuzzy since \u201cBenji\u201d Stiller was a kid, as he and his sister would often join their parents during their variety show appearances, and Jerry was always rolling his 8mm at home and on family vacations. Stiller mentions a trip to see a bullfight in Spain, and sure enough we\u2019re treated to footage 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 captured it on film and left the footage to rot in a closet?\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say, and Stiller himself might not even know for sure. The only certainty is that he\u2019s fascinated with the extent to which people are shaped by the images they project of themselves into the world, and haunted by the notion that his parents needed to complement each other in order to seem complete \u2014\u00a0that their chemistry on camera made it difficult for them to function as individuals at home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film eventually exalts in the success that Jerry and Anne both found on their own (she on stage, and he on \u201cSeinfeld\u201d), but \u201cNothing Is Lost\u201d is far more engaged in diagnosing the problems of their dynamic than it is in addressing how they weathered them. Stiller finds plenty of love and tenderness throughout the years, but weathering problems is most of what a long marriage is, and eventually his father stopped recording the footage that a film like this would need to offer this story a more satisfying resolution than death.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The fact that Stiller reunited with Taylor during the pandemic might have provided the sense of an ending (it\u2019s easy to imagine how a more opportunistic film might have allowed the director to find a clear \u201clesson\u201d from the tapes that Jerry left behind), but Stiller is only willing to crack open so much of his life for our viewing pleasure. \u201cNothing Is Lost\u201d is more for him than it is for us, and so \u201cin for a penny, in for a pound\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to apply.\u00a0<\/p>\n

We know that he was feeling low and lost after his father died, and that the afterimage of his parents\u2019 marriage played some kind of a role in his decision to bring his own family back together, but the details are frustratingly few and far between. Of course, life and art will always be more tightly entwined for Stiller than he knows how to untangle; that he\u2019s at least learned to become aware of that is perhaps as touching and honest a tribute as he ever could have paid to his parents\u2019 legacy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

\u201cStiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost\u201d will be available to stream on Apple TV starting Friday, October 24.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Stiller remembers the day he told his son Quin \u2014\u00a0then only eight or nine years old \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":234777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[15915,49,48,75,1554,337,209,111179],"class_list":["post-234776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-apple-tv","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-stiller-and-meara-nothing-is-lost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/234777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}