They were the hottest comic “double act” of their day. Stiller & Meara were never as hip as Nichols and May, but reliably funny, TV (“family audience”) friendly and just edgy enough to give the live New York studio audiences for “The Ed Sullivan Show” knowing giggles. They were TV mainstays for decades.
They raised a couple of kids and kept a seriously unconventional marriage together for over 60 years while each eventually pursued solo stardom as a sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic actress and an always amusing — even in thrillers — comic character actor.
Their famous son, Ben Stiller, marvels at how they managed it even as he and sister Amy note how rocky things sometimes were in “Stiller & Meara: Nothing is Lost,” Ben’s documentary valentine to his parents.
It’s a sweet and comical tribute and an attempted dissection of a union that lasted, comedy routines that endure and the love and egos and shouting matches that somehow allowed it to work.
“Sometimes we couldn’t tell if it was real or they were ‘rehearsing,'” siblings Ben and Amy complain.
“Rehearsing,” they dad and then their mom would admit in scores of TV interviews with the likes of Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin. “That’s what we tell’em,” the parents would say of their kids. Jerry and Anne would get a laugh for the admission. But just as often, they’d admit that no, “We’re fighting” to their kids and to their TV hosts and audiences, which seemed more accepting of rancorous marital dischord in that earlier age.
Anne Meara was a self-described “Irish princess from Long Island,” and Catholic, when she met the short, intense Jewish striver from Williamsburg, Brooklyn in acting school. Stiller’s chutzpah and Meara’s sprawling, emotionally open presence made for a hilarious stage act which they launched in the ’60s — after Jerry convinced Anne that comedy was serious business that could make them rich and famous, to boot.
Their sketch act played up the seeming mismatch of their coupling with Stiller often the straight man to Meara’s droll put downs and broad, loud comical mood swings. Talent scout and taste-influencer supreme Ed Sullivan adored them and made them famous for reasons the documentary reveals.
The fact that they had their act spill over into comical bickering in TV interviews over the decades made for fun TV, but created confusion in their kids, who coped with childhoods in which one or both parents wasn’t around. A lot.
Both Amy and Ben got their intro to show business in films and TV shows featuring their parents and little Benjy eventually reached “the apex of show business,” a big box office star and producer/director who’d cast his family in his shows and movies. Jerry documented all this, Ben notes when going through his father’s vast “collection” — bad reviews (Jerry would sometimes write irate notes to critics) included.
Jerry “saved everything” his late wife lamented for comical effect, as if he expected they merited their own exhibit at the Smithsonian. But that vast archive made this documentary possible.
Stiller the elder provides much of the film’s visual and aural documentation of the parents’ career, the kids’ childhoods and the state of the Meara/Stiller marriage. Ben Stiller had access to decades of love letters and audio of parental arguments and state-of-the-marriage conversations, some of them recorded over the phone.
These were remarkably “public” lives, with the kids landing laughs with their parents in assorted gigs and Jerry and Anne perfecting their interview shtick on live or live-on-tape TV. They made “shaddup” a loving punchline.
“Shut up, Jerry, that’s not interesting” is how Jerry described Anne’s ability to get him back on the funny track in these interviews.
Looking at outtakes from Jerry Stiller’s finest hours as a comic actor, his turn in “Seinfeld,” it’s obvious he wasn’t the better actor or even that good at remembering his lines, something son Ben realized as he made “Nothing is Lost.”
“I don’t think Dad would have had a career in comedy without her.”
But Jerry did, and the painstaking ways he and Meara polished sketches, figured out laughs and perfected their act made her a future playwright and informed Anne’s dramatic work in her later career. Jerry pretty much stole every scene he ever undertook in “Seinfeld,” often earning a cackle just from the way he’d stumble into the wrong word emphasis in a line, an effect Larry David made sure to preserve.
“Nothing is Lost” is never quite the probing analysis of their marriage that it might have been, with Ben attempting to use how they made it work to understand whatever it was that almost ended his marriage (he and wife Christine Taylor separated, then came back together during COVID).
With Ben and Amy and Christine and Ben and Christine’s near-adult kids weighing in, this is very much the “authorized” version of the parents’ and their children’s biographies. The film doesn’t achieve “confessional” and there’s no hint of scandal or infidelity in either marriage in the movie. Anne had her struggles with alcohol, but Ben lets Christopher Walken describe his father as a “saint” and his mom as the one who “scared” him, which makes us wonder if Daddy’s Boy was a bit biased in how he pitches all this.
But it’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.
Rating: TV-MA, profanity
Cast: Ben Stiller, Amy Stiller, Christine Taylor, Christopher Walken, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara.
Credits: Directed by Ben Stiller. An Apple TV+ release (Oct. 24).
Running time: 1:38
Movie Nation 