Family tapes to festival circuit
Ben Stiller’s new documentary, “Stiller and Meara,” turns a director’s lens toward something intimate: life with two of America’s sharpest wits, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller. The film mines home videos, early club sets, and broadcast archives to map how a marriage became a comedy engine—and how growing up backstage shaped Ben’s own craft. In interviews, he describes toggling between adoring son and exacting filmmaker, balancing candor with care as he revisits material that made the couple famous on TV and in nightclubs. The cut premiered to a crowd eager for both nostalgia and new angles on a duo often reduced to punchlines; here, the gags are scaffolding for a bigger story about partnership, reinvention, and the grind of show business.
A legacy beyond punchlines
The documentary frames the Stillers’ Bronx-to-Broadway climb as a boot camp on timing, resilience, and reinvention. Their banter reads differently in long view: not just bits, but a working marriage reading each other’s breaths. Colleagues explain how Meara’s dramatic instincts sanded the edges of Jerry’s hurricane timing, creating a rhythm that later echoed in Ben’s directing. For audiences who know Jerry as Frank Costanza and Anne from “Sex and the City,” the film restores the duo’s full era-spanning influence. It also lingers on grief and gratitude—Ben catalogs what fame gave and what it took, noting how comedy was both shield and spotlight. Expect a release that doubles as a family album and an industry artifact, a reminder that the funniest acts are often the most meticulously built.