My Mom Jayne (2025) reminds me of Stewie Griffin’s suggesting that, while they’re not actually related, Brad Pitt being John Lithgow’s nephew sounds like something that could be true. Discovering that Mariska Hargitay is Jayne Mansfield’s daughter kind of has the opposite effect. First, there’s the apparent lack of physical resemblance. Then, there’s the antithetical career paths. Mansfield was a celebrity, a movie star, a sex symbol. Hargitay is a workmanlike television actress with a familiar face to a niche audience and a lowish profile that allows her to escape the extremes of media scrutiny. She’s less Jayne Mansfield daughter and more that lady from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Those may sound like backhanded compliments at best, but the truth is that I like Hargitay and her work. She might herself agree that a signature role in an acclaimed drama series, a steady paycheck, and a degree of relative anonymity is a pretty sweet gig. However, after more than a quarter of a century in SVU, it’s somewhat difficult to see Hargitay as anything or anyone other than Detective/Captain Olivia Benson. She’s like one of those amaranthine soap-opera leading ladies minus the negative connotation. Finding out she’s not a self-chosen, self-made, self-contained entity but rather has a family and a life outside the show came as something of a shock. While Mansfield was always “on,” Hargitay is only on whenever SVU is on. The more I thought about all those things, the less interested I became in Jayne Mansfield. That’s not necessarily a deal breaker. Many documentaries are not about who they’re about but about who made them. My Mom Jayne is at least as much about Hargitay as it is about her mother; because Hargitay is so unassuming and she’s the subject of her own documentary only indirectly, the film doesn’t come off as a cry for attention — just something she thought would make a good story, not least because it hits close to home. Directing a film and starring in it as herself showcases a different professional facet as well as allows us a candid glimpse into who Hargitay is as a person. Moreover, her motivation is compelling in and of itself; it addresses her own emotional void while clarifying why she didn’t take after the mother she barely knew and has no memories of.

Source on TMDB