My Mom Jayne is a touching documentary about Mariska Hargitay’s journey to uncover the nuances of her mother, Jayne Mansfield. A film about Hollywood, but more so a documentary about mothers and daughters. Mariska Hargitay documents a moving story of discovering empathy for the girl your mother once was.

CMG Worldwide is a brand licensing and intellectual property management agency. You can scroll through their Instagram; it is a scrapbook of famous faces the company owns the rights to. There are photos of Einstein, quotes from Malcom X, cardboard stand-ups of James Dean. Scroll a little further and there’s a photo of Jayne Mansfield, wrapped in a pink towel. She’s standing in her famous home, the Pink Palace. The photo is tagged #oldhollywood, #vintagehollywood, #legacy. It has 33 likes. The room she’s standing in was destroyed in 2002. My Mom Jayne opens with director and daughter of Jayne Mansfield, Mariska Hargitay, walking on the land that used to house the Pink Palace. Only the gates to the Pink Palace remain, a romantic symbol of this home. Most of Mansfield’s items were sold off after her death to pay down her debts. What’s left is an unremarkable storage unit, and a few items owned by her children. 

Mariska Hargitay explores the unique position of a child of a historical icon in My Mom Jayne. The documentary is unique in its unabashed perspective of the family of Mansfield. Documentaries of historic entertainers like Mansfield almost always involve the family of the deceased in some capacity. HBO’s Faye (2024) and Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind (2020) both feature the involvement of the subject’s children. My Mom Jayne does not feature any of the famous faces typically featured in these documentaries, declaring the importance of the figure. Instead, Hargitay populates her film with people who personally knew Mansfield– primarily her family– who articulate their memories and personal perspectives on the woman. Their memories are touching, and brought me to tears several times throughout the film. The documentary becomes a story of grief, of children who have had to live their lives without their mother. The film is a refreshing look at Hollywood parenting. Yes, the children were aware of their mother’s troubles. But as one sibling describes: “I felt safe, I felt loved.” 

Hargitay is particularly unique in that she can not remember her mother, relying on her siblings and step mother to describe what they witnessed of Jayne’s short life. The filmmaker explains that she has some unresolved feelings about her childhood. She notes her baby book was sparsely filled out, and she sees alienation in photos of her childhood self. She was only three years old when her mother tragically passed away in a horrific car accident. And yet, as she became famous herself, she received fan mail over the years filled with mentions of her mother Jayne. This becomes a strange public mourning of a private figure when a Hargitay shows a fan letter she received with her own birth announcement enclosed. Hargitay pushed her unknowable mother away for most of her life, even expressing that in her younger years she was uncomfortable with her mom’s status a sex symbol. Hargitay decides to get to know her mother, to understand a deeper part of her history. A particularly touching moment is when Hargitay shows how she decided to throw a birthday party for her mom during the COVID pandemic, complete with homemade pink construction paper decorations. A party for an absent figure, an exercise in traditional milestones to process something that was missing from Hargitay’s life.

The documentary follows Mansfield’s life mostly in chronological order. The film shows her hustling to become famous, her rise to fame, her peak, and the eventual downturn of her career. The documentary shows Mansfield’s ambition; how she built her career out of nothing, as a single mom of a young child. To become a working actress with regular roles is no easy feat, and to become an icon is even more rare. Still, this is where some of the cliches of Hollywood stories creep into the documentary. The film discusses how Mansfield longed for more serious roles, and was forced to accept work that aligned more with a stereotyped Mansfield role. There is no denying that a sex symbol often has a short shelf life. This is particularly true for a woman who was an even more bombastic version of a woman than Marilyn Monroe was, a parody of a hyperbole. These feelings of being stifled appear true to Mansfield’s headspace in her career. Still, the documentary’s framing of this struggle dips into a devaluing of “low” art. Mansfield was a gifted comedian who did great work on Broadway and film. While the documentary has a great montage of her films, one leaves the documentary remembering the box the industry put Mansfield in, rather than remembering the work she did. 

The documentary explicitly intended to correct assumptions of Mansfield, particularly in showing her intellect. The filmmakers note that Mansfield spoke several languages, and was trained in violin and piano. The film features several interviews where Mansfield was forced to make herself smaller for her male interviewers: to flirt, to show her motherly side, to put her violin away when an interviewer shouts, “Who cares, kiss me!” But, the film falls into the cliche of framing this as a struggle between the private/public Jayne. The framing is a cliche of many narratives we tell about stars. We all have many different lives: our selves at work, our selves at home, our selves with friends. When appearing in public, Mansfield was doing a job. This psychoanalyzing of some kind of “split” becomes a cliche. This is not to deny that Mansfield may have felt objectified. But the articulation of this struggle as the filmmakers trying to find “the real Jayne Mansfield” is overly simplistic. 

It is an inescapable fact that we have to rely on the people that knew Jayne – rather than Mansfield herself– to describe her life, and this presents challenges of bias and memory. For example, Hargitay’s stepmother describes Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay’s marriage dissolving, and the issues that lead up to it. She describes Jayne’s depression as a contributing factor. I don’t doubt that the second wife of Hargitay would have insights into this, but there is a complicating issue of perspective and familial bias. At another point in the film, Mansfield’s oldest says, “I don’t know because I can’t speak for her.” This is a refreshingly honest moment from Mansfield’s daughter, and an important remark left in the film by Hargitay. We can’t really know how Jayne felt. She can’t speak for herself, as she is no longer with us. 

The documentary shifts to primarily focus on Mariska Hargitay’s discovery that her biological father is not who she thought he was. She learns Nelson Sardelli is her real father, a man Mansfield became pregnant with out of wedlock. At age 25, she acquiesced to the Jayne Mansfield fan club president’s request to meet up. He brought up the rumor of Nelson Sardelli, showing Hargitay a photo of the man in question. This extremely uncomfortable and odd experience is again a unique perspective of Hargitay’s life as a child of the Old Hollywood ecosystem. This sent Hargitay on a journey to figure out who her father is. Nelson Sardelli and Hargitay met when she was in her 30’s, and we learn they have developed a close relationship. Hargitay gives Sardelli the space to apologize on camera for removing himself from her life, and we feel Hargitay’s own relief at this resolution. Hargitay also grows to understand her mother on a deeper level. Hargitay is 61 years old, nearly double her mother’s age when she passed. Hargitay describes her change in perspective of her mother with age. Mansfield first became pregnant at 17 years old, a woman who was a– Hargitay’s words– baby when she was becoming Jayne Mansfield. This growth, this empathy for her mother’s position, is a beautiful, emotionally truthful moment. 

My Mom Jayne ends with the siblings opening that storage unit. It’s filled with movie posters and clippings, covered in fifty years of dust. The siblings watch as Mariska Hargitay holds their mother’s Golden Globe, giving Hargitay their blessing to take it home and place it next to Hargitay’s own. My Mom Jayne ends on this touching note, as Mariska Hargitay manages to buy her mother’s piano back. Hargitay places the piano where it belongs, in her home, with Jayne’s grandchildren. This object is not with an intellectual property management company, it’s not in a Hollywood museum on Santa Monica Boulevard – this worn instrument that Jayne loved is with her family.

Grade: B-

Oscars Prospects:
Likely: None
Should be Considered: Best Documentary Feature

Where to Watch: Streaming on Max