“PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF” (HBO Max)
Streaming in two 90-minute episodes, “Pee-Wee as Himself” might seem a case of show-biz overkill.
Sure, funnyman Pee-Wee Herman was wildly entertaining, but can you really fill three documentary hours with him?
Uh, yeah. Not only fill them, but leave you with a sob in your throat when it’s all over.
That silly/sly manchild Pee-Wee was the onstage alter ego of comic Paul Reubens, who had a pretty good resume even before creating his bow-tied, pink-cheeked character. The big revelation of Matt Wolf’s doc is that for much of his lifetime (he died of cancer in 2023), Paul Reubens spent more time as Pee-Wee than as Paul.
It was a case of performance art carried to Kaufmann-esque extremes.
This doc was made with the cooperation (often grudgingly) of Reubens, who sat for endless on-camera interviews to talk about his Pee-Wee character, his career, and the scandals that threatened to sink it all. Throughout he frets that somebody else is telling his story. He can be kinda cranky.
There are contributions from friends and co-workers like Cassandra Peterson (better known as the spooky/sexy Elivra), “SNL” legend Laraine Newman, Natasha Lyonne (as a child she was a regular on TV’s “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”), S. Epatha Merkerson and Lawrence Fishburne (also “Playhouse” veterans), director Tim Burton (who got his start in features with “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure”), filmmaker Judd Apatow and friends Debi Mazar and David Arquette, who got to know Reubens when he wasn’t Pee-Wee.
There’s all sorts of back story. RE: Reuben’s work with the Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles (one of his best buds was the late Phill Hartman; also Kansas City actress Edie McClurg was part of the original Pee-Wee cast). His creation of dozens of recurring characters for that troupe. And the gradual development of the impish Pee-Wee, a character so beloved that not even a tawdry sex scandal could put much of a dent in his fan base.
We get insight into Reubens’ private life. In those months when he wasn’t playing Pee-Wee he grew long hair and a beard, making him virtually unrecognizable.
He acknowledges that he is gay and even had a live-in boyfriend, but once the Pee-Wee phenomenon took off he dived deep into the closet. (We tend to forget that in the ‘70s being outed could be a career killer.)
Paul Reubens in police mug shot
And of course there’s no escaping the scandals. In one instance Reubens was arrested allegedly for masturbating in a porn theater. In the other LA cops raided his home for child pornography. They found only vintage physical culture mags (Reubens had a massive collection of kitschy ‘50s homoeroticism). In both cases Reubens plead guilty or nolo contendre to end the episodes, even though he here claims he’s innocent of those crimes and would have prevailed in court if he’d wasted the time and money on the effort.
But what makes “Pee-Wee As Himself” so damn wonderful is the cornucopia of clips of his work. Was “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” the greatest kid’s TV show of all time? It’s got my vote.
Ultimately this is portrait of a man far more comfortable playing a role than living everyday life. It was tough on him…but good for the rest of us.
Jayne Mansfield and daughter Mariska Hargitay
“My Mom Jayne” My rating: B+ (HBO Max)
105 minutes / No MPAA rating
After her decades in the role of Det. Olivia Benson on TV’s “Law & Order: SVU,” fans of actress Mariska Hargitay by now are aware of her show-biz pedigree: She is the daughter of mid-century sex bomb Jayne Mansfield.
Not that she remembers her mother. Hargitay was only three in 1967 when she was pulled from the wreckage of the car in which her mother died. And as she tells us in this documentary (her feature directing debut), she has lived her life with no memory of Jayne Mansfield.
In fact, her widowed father, the late Hungarian-born athlete and bodybuilder Micky Hargitay, advised her to steer clear of the scandal-saturated Mansfield biographies and documentaries that have come out over the years. So in a weird way, Hargitay’s knowledge of Jayne Mansfield wasn’t much greater than that of your average pop culture fan.
“My Mom Jayne” operates on two levels. First, it is a daughter’s quest to understand her mother, to get a grasp on her own family history. Thus it is a very personal examination of her own life.
Hargitay interviews her older siblings, mining their childhood memories. She talks to her mother’s press secretary (who wrote a Mansfield biography filled with insider revelations).
Late in the film she visits a storage facility where for the first time she sorts through the detritus of her mother’s life (a Golden Globe statuette, movie posters, a publicity album overflowing with press clippings).
But even deeper, it is an appreciation of Mansfield, a woman whose reputation as the poor man’s Monroe didn’t begin to reflect her depths, desires and hardships.
Throughout the doc we get tons of photos, movie clips, TV appearances and interviews. The film makes the case for Mansfield being a talented actress whose ambitions were undermined by the pneumatic dumb blonde performance that got her foot in Hollywood’s door and then could not be extracted.
Pregnant at 16 and divorced by the time she was 20 and trying to gain traction in Tinsel Town, Jayne Mansfield found herself at 21 starring in a hit Broadway comedy and launching a movie career that today is regarded as forgettable but at the time was the talk of the industry.
She played piano and violin (there’s footage of her sawing the fiddle on Ed Sullivan’s show) and spoke several languages. But she was also a shameless publicity hound.
Apparently through all this she was a great mother, if her children are to be believed. Even when her marriage to Hargitay was breaking up and she was dating/marrying other men (most of them brutes, this film suggests), Jayne Mansfeld was devoted to the kids.
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the whole situation, the filmmaker drops the big one. It turns out that Mariska Hargitay was not the natural daughter of Mickey Hargitay, the man who raised her. Her biological father, whom she did not meet until well into adulthood, is the Italian-born Vegas entertainer Norman Sardelli, who had a brief but torrid affair with Jayne Mansfield when she was separated from Hargitay. Late in the film we meet Sardelli (89 at the time) and the two half-sisters Mariska never knew she had in a kitchen table conference that is both achingly sad and hilariously funny.
Revelations like this might move some of us to bitterness. Mariska Hargitay seems happy to incorporate the Sardellis into her larger family.
She also shows her chops behind the camera. “My Mom Jayne” succeeds on just about every level.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 