Mariska Hargitay walks a fine line in 'My Mom Jayne'

It's natural to feel some skepticism when anyone, especially a celebrity, makes a documentary about their own family. Being truly fair to everyone is a challenge even for documentarians who don't know their subjects; how can anyone be expected to be fair to everyone they see at holidays, but also everyone they haven't seen in years? Fair to everyone who can tell their side of the story, but also fair to everyone who can’t — the people stuck with whatever documentation they left behind and the subjective recollections of the living? Most people don't want to do a takedown of their own families, but they don't want to gloss over everything either.

Mariska Hargitay is best-known for having starred in Law & Order: SVU for more than 25 years. But she's also the daughter of actress Jayne Mansfield, who died in a car crash when Hargitay was only three years old. Hargitay and two of her brothers were in the car, in the back seat, and they all survived. She says she has no memories of Jayne at all; she was simply too young.

In the very good HBO documentary My Mom Jayne, Hargitay says she began the project, in large part, to reckon with the fact that she'd long been embarrassed by Jayne's sex symbol image and the "dumb blonde" persona she sometimes adopted. Without memories of her mother as a mother, Hargitay was left largely with Jayne's outsized cultural footprint (which of course was forged in the gender dynamics of the 1950s and 1960s), and she acknowledges consciously distancing herself from it.

In the film, Hargitay works closely with her older siblings, who are clearly, at least at first, doing this project because she asked them to, even though they'd rather not. And while that could be uncomfortable, it ultimately comes across as an expression of their love for her, and not as the result of pressure or coercion. They know she has had different struggles because of how young she was, and in interviews, they do their best to fill in what they can.

What's gotten the most attention about the documentary is that Hargitay makes public the fact that her dad, Mickey Hargitay, who died in 2006, was not her biological father. Her biological father is a singer named Nelson Sardelli, who had a (fairly public) relationship with Jayne for a few months after she and Mickey were divorced but while they were still together off and on.

But this does not emerge as scandal; rather, it emerges as a part of this family's complicated story of truth and ... not-truth. As Mariska tells the story, when she was 25 (so around 1989), the leader of Jayne's fan club inadvertently revealed Nelson Sardelli's existence to her. She'd never known that there was fairly open gossip about him potentially being her biological father, in part because Mickey encouraged her not to read books about Jayne. She confronted Mickey, and he shut her down, and seeing how much pain it caused him, she never talked about it with him again. Five years later, though, she and a friend went to see Nelson Sardelli perform in Atlantic City, and she introduced herself. He told her about his relationship with Jayne and later introduced Mariska to his kids — her sisters.

The fact that there is sympathy for (and in some cases accountability for) many different parties is what makes My Mom Jayne effective. It is not a simple story of her being against secrets and her parents being in favor of them. She, too, takes responsibility in the film for asking other people, particularly the sisters she met when she was an adult, to keep secrets by not revealing how they knew her. (Mariska does not use terms like "half-sister" or "half-brother." She just has siblings with different stories.)

But she seems very glad to know the truth, less for abstract reasons and more because it has, for her, helped her in concrete ways. It helped her understand strange feelings of separateness she had as a kid, and why her maternal grandmother seemed to feed those feelings. Everything right down to her name — her birth certificate says Mariska (which is Hungarian, like Mickey), but her mother called her Maria (which can be Italian, like Nelson) — makes more sense now that she knows what happened. And it brought new people into her life, including Nelson and his kids.

It is high praise to say My Mom Jayne reminded me of Stories We Tell, a 2012 documentary by the actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley, which is also about her biological father not being the father who raised her. That film is funnier than this one, with a sharper edge, and Polley is a more adventurous filmmaker than Hargitay, who uses a fairly straightforward combination of archival footage and talking heads. But the two projects have in common an empathy for one's own parents, and an ability to see them clearly and lovingly at the same time. (They are also both very good films about siblings and sibling love.)

While the love a documentarian has for her family can be a challenge in getting at what's true, it's also the animating force and the source of the emotional weight of the story. And My Mom Jayne is less a biography of Jayne Mansfield than a study of how, in one family, people who love each other manage to live alongside their regrets, and alongside the mistakes that they have made and that other people, flawed and uncertain about what to do, have made in turn.