6 hours ago
4
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.
And perhaps Ben has discovered something that Jerry and Meara discovered – but suppressed and kept smiling like the troupers that they were. Show business is a cruel vocation not simply because it takes you away from your family, but because it always promises a level of superstar euphoria that is fleeting, or never arrives at all; someone else is more successful than you, someone else has more awards, someone else’s project gets commissioned. When Amy tells Ben on camera how tough it was for her to be waitressing while he was becoming a movie star, he can only smile sadly.
There is also an intriguing and very revealing sketch that Ben did as a young kid, based on family therapy sessions they once had, when the comically obnoxious Ben tells Jerry the father is less famous than the son. Then Amy infuriates Ben with an anecdote about him wetting the bed. An intriguing, bittersweet family study.
