Gloria Vanderbilt Documentary Nothing Left Unsaid Doesn’t Say Enough (2025)

Part fascinating chronicle of a dynamic American life, part vaguely frustrating vanity project, the new HBO documentary Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper, premiering on April 9, maps the emotional trajectory of heiress, artist, and entrepreneur Gloria Vanderbilt’s 92 years on this earth with a gentle, sometimes not entirely earned reverence. Vanderbilt, scion of one of the wealthiest families in the nation’s history, has ridden a wave of tumult and success with an undeniable elegance—both a romantic and a pragmatist, Vanderbilt has been something of a vagabond free spirit, while still maintaining a classically blue-blooded reserve, a hale, perhaps slightly haughty steadfastness that’s proven invaluable during the darker chapters of her life.

At least that’s how we see her in Liz Garbus’s film, a project brought to HBO by Vanderbilt’s son, CNN anchor and New York media royalty Anderson Cooper. Though Vanderbilt has had many extraordinary experiences, which are captivatingly retold in Nothing Left Unsaid’s most engaging stretches, we don’t quite get a full sense of who she is at her core, what it is exactly that has sustained and fueled her throughout the last almost century—beyond, frankly, opportunity and wealth. There’s a certain stubbornness that’s well illustrated here, I suppose, an aristocratic conviction that the grand ship must keep steaming along. But the film maybe too immediately buys into the mythos of Vanderbilt, and of all Great Families: a purchased idea that there is something innately worth knowing about them, an argument Nothing Left Unsaid fails to make convincingly enough.

The early part of Vanderbilt’s life, when she was the famous “poor little rich girl” at the center of a bitter custody dispute that was then known as “the trial of the century,” was fraught with sad dynastic intrigue that Garbus lays out with compassion and narrative zeal. And as Vanderbilt navigates her long and complicated romantic life, including several marriages and affairs with the likes of Sidney Lumet and Frank Sinatra, she takes on an almost Zelig-like quality, forever adapting to her surroundings as she traverses influential circles. But she’s possessed of her own agency and influence too, of course, owed to the material fact of her money, and to her lively intelligence and curiosity. There’s a mini-series’s worth of anecdotes to be unpacked here, but the film only gives us the tantalizing overview.

The film would have more time to devote to this meaty stuff if it wasn’t for its recursive returns to the present, which feature glimpses of Vanderbilt in her studio—she’s admirably still making art every day—and protracted scenes of Cooper interviewing Vanderbilt, the intent being to suss out the motivations behind each tack in her life, but also, presumably, to provide some larger portrait of a mother and son. But the bond between Cooper and Vanderbilt, while obviously loving, isn’t articulated much beyond that. And though the final portion of the film offers a harrowing, gut-wrenching recounting of the suicide of Cooper’s brother, Carter, another son, Cooper’s half-brother Christopher Stokowski, is briefly said to have been estranged from the family for 30 years and is then never mentioned again.

Might a less obsequious documentary have delved further into this? Maybe. Garbus ultimately seems at the service of her subjects, which gives the film, meant to be an intimate character study of sorts, a sheen of deceptiveness, or at least selective honesty. There are too many scenes in the film in which Vanderbilt and Cooper, but Cooper especially, seem aware of the camera—there’s an air of performance here that wouldn’t be a problem if this were an elaborately made home movie, but as a film meant for the public, airing on our most prestigious cable network no less, it comes across a bit indulgent. I also wish the documentary assumed less familiarity with Gloria and the rest of the Vanderbilts—a brief section in which the family historian (all families should have such a person, no?) tells the Vanderbilt origin story is, in some ways, the most enlightening part of the film.

I don’t think there is any malintent behind Nothing Left Unsaid. It simply falls victim to a natural kind of familial self-regard, a belief that the bonds shared by us and our parents and siblings and aunts and grandparents are uniquely special. In many ways they are, of course. But even a family as mighty and storied as the Vanderbilts can be, well, a little common, a fact made plain in some of Nothing Left Unsaid’s duller, more narcissistic moments. Gloria Vanderbilt has had a strange, remarkable life, but Garbus’s film only plays the hits with a soft pedal, giving the family the gauzy, bittersweet photo album they asked for, instead of the incisive, enthralling saga of American wealth, access, and ingenuity Nothing Left Unsaid possibly could have been.

Which is all to say, the film only spends about a minute on Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans. Which is about 14 minutes too few. What is family without its jeans, after all?