Except for two irksome elements, Mariska Hargitay‘s My Mom Jayne (Max) is an emotionally affecting doc about identity — both suppressed (Mariska’s) and misunderstood (in the case of Mariska’s late mom, Jayne Mansfield) — and emotional closure by way of family ties and genetics.
It’s a little too weepy and whiney here and here. There is always an urge among modern women to turn women of the past into victims. But the doc settles in and touches bottom by the end.
In plainer terms, it’s about (a) the 61 year-old Mariska delving into who her famous blonde bombshell mom (who died in a horribly violent car crash at age 34) really was deep down, and (b) how Mariska came to discover that her biological dad wasn’t Mickey Hargitay, her putative father who was married to Mansfield between 1958 and 1964 and who raised Mariska after Mansfield’s death.
Mariska’s actual dad is a Brazilian-Italian lounge singer named Nelson Sardelli, whom Mansfield had an extra-marital affair with in mid ’63 and early ’64.
Mariska didn’t get around to facing the truth about Sardelli until the early 1990s, a year or so before she turned 30. For structural and dramatic reasons the doc holds his information back until the final 25 minutes or so.
Irksome element #1 is that as a young child Mariska (aka Maria) appeared to have been adopted, as her eyes and hair were much darker than those of her siblings. Any stranger would have taken one look at young Mariska and presumed she wasn’t from the same gene pool as her two brothers, Miklos and Zoltan, whose natural father was Mickey Hargitay; ditto her much older sister, Jayne Marie Mansfield, from her mom’s first marriage.
Mariska’s biological dad, the Neapolitan-featured Sardelli, was born in Brazil and is of Italian descent. Hence Mariska looked vaguely like a daughter of southern Italy or Sicily. She certainly bore no resemblance to her Hungarian body-builder caregiver “dad”, who was born in Budapest. It’s odd how this obvious biological fact was ignored or denied for as long as it was. Which just goes to show that if there’s a strong enough will, denial can be a very powerful force in people’s lives.
Irksome element #2 occurs when Mariska interviews actor Tony Cimber (born in ‘65), the son of Jayne and her third husband, Matt Cimber, a film director and promoter.
Mariska confronts Tony with stories about some ugly behavior that happened between Jayne and Matt, mostly a result of Matt’s provocation (presumably domestic violence and bruisings). She seems to be asking Tony to atone for these incidents or perhaps even accept responsibility for his father having struck Jane — a bizarre idea, to say the least. Tony says he’s not going to “own” his father’s behavior, as he doesn’t see how this could lead to anything that would heal or cleanse. Mariska’s non-verbal but emotionally readable response is one of seeming disapproval or disappointment.
HE to God: In what realm do you look at the son or daughter of an acknowledged shithead and say, “You need to face the fact that your parent was an abusive person, and so perhaps you need to apologize for this.” WHAT?
Please forgive my morbid interest in Jayne Mansfield‘s gruesome car crash death, which happened in the wee hours in rural Louisiana on 6.29.67. Mansfield, her scumbag boyfriend Sam Brody, an attorney, and the 19 year-old driver, Ronald B. Harrison, were instantly killed when their car, travelling on a two-lane blacktop between 60 mph and 80 mph, smashed into a tractor-trailer which had slowed nearly to a standstill. It was reportedly quite foggy with limited visibility, and yet Harrison drove through this atmospheric muck like a bat out of hell. He basically murdered Mansfield.
The urban myth was that Mansfield was decapitated, although this account has been dismissed. The apparent truth, to go by a photo I happened upon last weekend, is that she was half-decapitated. The photo that ran in newspapers the day after her death showed Mansfield’s supine body lying under a sheet. The photo I found two days ago shows her uncovered body (no sheet) lying in the same position, and the top half of her head (sorry) appears to have been sliced off.
