For an older generation, they were Stiller & Meara, the comedy duo with an endlessly absurd sketch of sketch on the Ed Sullivan Show. To a young generation, he was the fulminating father of George Costanza Seinfeld.
For Ben Stiller, of course, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara were something much more intimate: her adorable but deeply complicated parents.
THE Compensation Stiller documents his ancestors in all their disorderly glory Stiller & Meara: Nothing is lost, A new documentary that premitted the world to the New York Film Festival Sunday before its beginnings in theaters and on Apple TV + later this month. What begins (and in fact what started) as an affectionate but thick portrait of the membrane of American comedy turns into something super imaginably in layers, studying many joint and parental relationships – and asking difficult questions about the price of perfectionism, the traps of parenting and, really, the ultimate value of a terrestrial life.
“Yes, it’s a bit personal,” said Stiller before the screening by describing what his family thought he was launching into this quest. “But it is also, I think, in a way on everyone.”
Even to those who know the comedy of the most Jewish-American and Irish-American Meara (they died in 2020 and 2015, respectively), some of the history will surprise-him, an army veteran of an unloved Brooklyn house who asked for urgent validation from the public; She, an agile comic talent weighted by her mother’s suicide when she was still a girl.
Ben Stiller, who does not skimp on his parents’ best moments in front of a camera, is not afraid of exposing the dark side they showed to him and his older sister Amy; Subjects like Anne’s alcoholism and the obsession with Jerry’s work to the detriment of her family benefit from rich treatment. And the relentless dedication of the elder from Stiller to Meara – he is seen on the screen only once in the recent past, and it is to boast the greatness of his deceased wife – could blind him to his faults and to the way in which his behavior could sometimes have injured the family.
But it is when Stiller turns the camera on himself – or more specifically on his wife and his two children – that the film clicks on, asking how much we repeat the errors of our parents and the limits of what we can learn from the past. Ben Stiller sought to avoid the trap of putting his work above his family, but during the realization of the film, with his children, with his children, he in fact reproduced. In one of the most pointed moments in the film, Stiller’s 20 -year -old son, Quin, said with sensitivity to his father that he feels that he and his sister came Ben’s second work, just as Ben felt with Jerry. The gaze on the director’s face at that time says everything.
“As a filmmaker, I think” it’s a good time for the film “. Stiller said after the screening of this interaction.
Apart from the whole famous thing, the title couple also lived an excessively shared life, and the film is interested in the impossible failure of a life and work partnership 24 hours a day, where, as Anne says, it can be difficult to know where the comedy team ends and the marriage begins. Ben Stiller and his wife Christine Taylor also frequently worked together, but with a little less traps; Taylor’s voice, it should be said, brings high levels of consideration and insight into a film not missing for one or the other quality.
Stiller establishes the film in the vast apartment of the Upper West Side where Anne and Jerry raised their families and to which Ben and Amy returned after Jerry’s death to pass, pack and throw all their parents’ stuff to prepare for the sale of the longtime house. And there is SO Lots of things. Jerry Stiller had a compulsive need to record and save everything, and while we are looking at Ben Stiller to take everything after the death of his father, there is something both humanizing and surreal at the sight of a famous actor undergoes the same heartbreaking ritual as everyone.
At this point of searching several years ago, Ben Stiller had no idea where his filmic lark would lead. Because Jerry Stiller had died during Covid, there was no memorial, and Ben simply considered his filming as a kind of cinematic equivalent of one: important for family and comedy, of little interest for anyone.
But when he showed images to friends and colleagues of entertainment, he started to obtain a certain type of feedback: maybe it would work better if you were going further and even wrapped your own soul? “I pushed myself to go out because I didn’t want it for me,” said Stiller during the projection. “And I realized that I had to go on the contrary.”
If the director leaves this feeling of processes, that is undressed, that parental errors have been repeated, he has the vulnerability to admit it. Although the complete improvement of generational can be a pipe dream, the film suggests at least the advantages of the modern desire to explore and expose. One cannot imagine the subjects of the film which never turn a critical eye in this way; Indeed, Jerry seems uncomfortable each time Anne even discusses the trivial details of their relationship to the camera. (Ben Stiller after the screening said that he thought his mother would like the film, but his father could be uncomfortable with the shared quantity.)
The film is subtitled “nothing is lost”, and although its melancholy aura actually suggests in fact that so much disappear, while the stillers paint both of artifacts and feelings, the film also finds a lot of encouragement in the pure, as uncomfortable offer, to ensure that certain things are kept.
