'My Mom Jayne' review: Mariska Hargitay's loving, moving tribute to Jayne Mansfield, the mother she barely knew
Mariska Hargitay with her mother, Jayne Mansfield, in a scene from "My Mom Jayne." Credit: Photo 12/Alamy Stock Photo/ HBO
DOCUMENTARY "My Mom Jayne"
WHEN|WHERE Friday at 8 p.m. on HBO; also streaming on Max
WHAT IT'S ABOUT On the night of June 29, 1967, outside Slidell, Louisiana, Jayne Mansfield — by then a fading Hollywood superstar and sex symbol — was killed in a car crash. Three of her children in the back seat survived, including her youngest daughter, Maria — now Mariska Hargitay — who was then 3. In this film, Hargitay ("Law & Order: SVU") says she spent "most of my life feeling ashamed of my mother ... a person who made her share of problematic choices and left me with loss and secrets." "My Mom Jayne" is an attempt to absolve that shame while coming to terms with those choices.
MY SAY In TV terms, Hargitay is primetime's preeminent long-hauler. She's spent 26 years on just one series while her own mom burned hot and bright, died young, and had just two credits (1956's "The Girl Can't Help It" and 1957's "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?") or, generously, three (1963's "Promises! Promises!") that anyone still remembers.
Opposites, yet mother and daughter.
There's quite a story here but "My Mom Jayne" focuses on just two. The first takes the form of a quest, as Hargitay interviews her surviving siblings, then gains access to a long-forgotten storage bin where her mother stored a lifetime of still photos and much else.
The second focuses on Hargitay herself — long assumed to be the daughter of former body builder Mickey Hargitay, Mansfield's second husband (who died in 2006). She says her biological father was in fact a once-popular 1950s-era Las Vegas lounge singer named Nelson Sardelli. Ninety now, Sardelli appears on camera to confirm paternity and offer further details about his long-ago affair with Mansfield. He squired Mansfield around Europe after she and Hargitay had split but were still married — hardly anything a tabloid would even glance at now, but back then quite the scandal. A child was conceived. (You now know who.)
As a viewer, the best way to approach this film is with a blank slate. Think of Mansfield as just another flawed, struggling human being who drifts to Hollywood where the flawed and dispossessed are eaten alive. She had big dreams that were sundered and bigger ambitions that were dashed. Her demons were of the usual sort — booze, drugs, sex, and the death of her own father while he was driving the family car when she too was just 3 (and also in the back seat).
And think of Mariska — you'll be on a first-name basis by film's end — as a flawed, struggling human being looking for answers. The search revolves around a long-lost baby grand that her mother once played. Mansfield was a proficient piano player and violinist — there are clips of her here playing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" as proof. Hollywood's "smartest dumb blonde," as the tabs cruelly once called her.
Was Mansfield a good mother? Hargitay certainly wants to believe so. But a good actress? "Rock Hunter" was a smash on Broadway, and for a brief moment, so was Mansfield, who went on to star in the big screen version. After that came the B-movie circuit, and when that foundered Mansfield went further down-market. There's not nearly enough here on that career but the moral, or at least the epitaph, to that career is clear enough: The studios exploited her, then kicked her to the curb when the box office dried up.
Mariska, by the way, finally secures ownership of that baby grand, and with it a measure of peace. "I get how hurt you must have been looking for something you never found," she says to a ghost. "I miss you, mom. I love you and miss you."
BOTTOM LINE Loving, at times moving, tribute but just not enough on Mansfield herself, who remains — in death as in life — elusive.
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