Apple TV + Doc de Ben Stiller

Biography, autobiography and family therapy supported by apples come together in the uneven but powerful documentary of Ben Stiller, Stiller & Meara: Nothing is lostFirst at the New York Film Festival before a launch on Apple TV + later this month.

Stiller’s most personal film easily as a director, it works as an interesting complement to the recent HBO documentary by Mariska Hargitay, My mom Jaynein which the Law and order: Unit of special victims Star and director explored gaps in her own identity through the public image and the private artefacts of the mother whom she has never really known.

In Nothing is lostStiller uses the public image and the private artefacts of the parents that he and the world knew very well, reflecting away between the public and the private, as well as his own difficulties according to the traces of his parents as an artist, spouse and father.

I think there is a perfectly fair reading of Nothing is lostEspecially fans of Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, that the couple deserved an exploratory showcase which is not 50% on the neuroses of their son. But ultimately, I think there is sadness and humor as Ben Stiller approaches, who mixes tonal traces of previous collaborators Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach.

Stiller is well aware of solipsism in this process which, allegedly, documents someone else’s life. The project occurred, he admits, for a moment in 2020 after the death of his father, which was preceded five years earlier by the death of his mother.

“I just felt unbalanced and unhappy and a little disconnected from my family, children – and just a little lost. And I started thinking about my parents and all the stress and tension that I remember having seen as a child and the pressure when they worked together and how they stayed together, ”says Stiller.

The title of the film refers both in the sense of nihilism which struck Stilleur at the heart of the world pandemic (which simultaneously ended a period of distance from her own marriage with actress Christine Taylor) and to her father’s trends as a collector.

While the documentary begins, Ben Stiller, his sister Amy Stiller and Dawn Eaton, former assistant of Anne and Jerry, are going through the longtime apartment of the family, fills in the ephemeral of memories and concretely with a box after press cuts, spared correspondences and cassettes that Jerry recorded over the decades. The collection stems from Jerry’s pride towards his family, from his love for Anne and, in the first phases, the number of aspects of their true marriage is one of the Stiller & Meara sketches.

Ben explains to Amy that the project he does, fired by his Escape in Dannemora And Breakup The filmmaker Jessica Lee Gagné will be built around the sale of the apartment, but the real compensation and sale are left for a poignant coda.

Instead, the documentary begins with them by reflecting on the debris of 60 -year -old marriage as a way to find their lives and their career. This includes looking at the Stiller & Meara sketches have played in countless talk shows, criticize their respective styles and think about how much or no apparently frank appearances and interviews were considered to be truth and no. The brothers and sisters go through old images, look at old super 8 images and even read from surprisingly graphic letters between their parents, expressing involuntary waves of horror and pride how Jerry and Anne were excited.

Nothing is lost does not go deep in the context of the particular brand of Stiller & Meara of the celebrity of the 60s and 70s, a partner style which had decades in vogue from Vaudeville on early television and has essentially disappeared today, but clips of clips The Ed Sullivan show And The Mike Douglas show Capture their rhythms and their energy. Several of these clips include discussions on and then the apparitions of the young Amy and the young Ben, a natural catalyst for Ben’s own introspection.

Without disseminating too much dirty laundry of his parents, Stiller looks at imperfections in a marriage which was, in many ways, idealized in the eyes of the public, plunging into the shared aspirations of Anne and Jerry and those which they maintained as an individual, and where the “family” was classified in these aspirations. This leads him to consider his own failures and success to marry a colleague interpreter and occasional colleague, which he learned from his parents in terms of prioritization of children and errors that he realizes that he has committed over the years.

Taylor, their daughter Ella and their son Quin, who all manage their presence in the camera in the camera in different ways.

Taylor thinks that it is important to raise stories linked to Anne and Jerry, but although Ben does not hesitate to speak of their pre-countryic separation, she does not think that it is his place for the franchise. A quin, now 20 years old, sees what Ben tries and nods above all, but he admits that in his youth, he rarely felt on the list of Ben’s priorities. Ella, now aged 23, is more fun and more willing to joke about things like being cut Walter Mitty’s secret life. She and her father laugh both, even if you feel that it has not always been a source of humor for her.

It is a delicate line that Amy also walks several times, because she remembers the years when she had trouble as a waitress when Ben’s star was riding. This is something they ride now, although Ben is not sure how to react.

It is this uncertainty that maintains Nothing is lost to feel unbearable. If Ben Stiller had directed this documentary as a man who had had uncertainties and found sufficient validation by browsing his parents’ stuff, he would be just evaporated in ether. Instead, his exercise reminds him that, even if celebrated his parents were, as impressive of the duration of their marriage, it is also advisable to remember the effort and imperfections and inconsistencies, so that nothing is lost.