Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost review – Ben Stiller’s moving study on the price his family paid for showbiz

Stiller’s documentary about his parents, comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, is a tender reflection on marriage and what it costs to keep smiling in the entertainment business

Ben Stiller has created a sweet, affectionate, unexpectedly poignant portrait of his parents Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara – and, perhaps without quite realising it, of himself as well. His mum and dad were two hard-working actor-comedians who had a very successful TV double act in the 60s and 70s and a long marriage. This has been the source of so much material, based on the quarrels and tensions to which Ben and his sister Amy were intimate witnesses.

Both parents’ backgrounds were hard. Anne’s mother had taken her own life; Jerry’s dad was tough and unsupportive. Perhaps they never experienced the full status of stardom that their son has enjoyed, although Jerry had a new lease of late-life TV fame in the 90s with his superb portrayal of George Costanza’s dad in Seinfeld. The film is centred on Ben and Amy clearing out their mum and dad’s New York apartment after Jerry died in 2020; Anne had died in 2015. And Ben Stiller himself emerges as a complex and unresolved personality from this film: he considers the fact that his parents were sometimes not there for him because of the pressures of show business, and that he himself was not around for his own children because of being away on film sets. He and his wife Christine Taylor separated for three years but reunited in 2020.