PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF (A-minus) - I've watched this twice, and I don't have much to say. It's a powerful final reveal of Paul Reubens, who died two years ago, giving the man his due after decades cloistered behind his fictional alter-ego, Pee-wee Herman. It's also a fascinating, but sometimes frustrating, first-person account by Matt Wolf of his years-long odyssey in bringing this troubled production to fruition.
Reubens sat for 40 hours of interviews, wrangling with Wolf throughout for a degree of control over the direction of his life story. He makes passive-aggressive jokes about being co-director, which eventually grow a bit tiresome, but the charm of Reubens shines through from beginning to end, the glint in his eye ever-present despite Reubens secretly suffering from cancer throughout the production. (Few people knew until his death was announced, and it came as a shock to Wolf as well as the rest of us.)
The over-arching theme here is Reubens' lifelong struggle to just be himself. He found a great excuse to avoid coming to terms with his homosexuality by creating the character of Pee-wee Herman, the fey, mischievous man-child. I consider that creation the post-war equal of Charlie Chaplin's Tramp, and if you don't, you probably won't have the patience for this 3.5-hour two-part HBO Max special.
The curation of clips here is impressive -- Reubens went to Cal Arts and then toiled as a founding member of the Groundlings comedy troupe, so there is plenty of archival film of him going back to the early '70s. Reubens developed a bunch of characters but settled on Pee-wee as the breakthrough, soon taking it to a bigger stage, and then on the road, which became an HBO special. With memorable turns on David Letterman's "Late Night," Pee-wee would eventually break through with a hit movie in 1985 ("Pee-wee's Big Adventure"), and then his brilliant Saturday morning TV show, before his career unraveled in 1991 after an arrest in a porn theater in Florida (where he grew up in the circus town of Sarasota and where his parents still lived at the time).
A decade later, Reubens would be the victim of overzealous prosecution when his vintage erotica collection was seized as a pretext to accuse him of possessing child pornography, an allegation that turned out to be false. But it was this later accusation that seemed to haunt Reubens all the way to his grave. Wolf is blessed with an ending when Reubens, who had ghosted him for the last year, recorded a final monologue the day before he died, still ruing that ordeal.
By the time that ending arrives, however, Wolf has spent nearly an hour belaboring those two scarlet letters stamped on Reubens' career. The film feels out of balance, with grim regret suffocating the joy that Reubens brought the world, both through Pee-wee and on his own during the last decades of his career. An aftertaste of oppressive gloom lingers long after viewing.
Maybe that's a sign of success. Reubens comes across as, if not self-loathing, then severely repressed, and the keen exploration of one man's psyche justifies the extended run time. His genius shines through, but he also was imprisoned by his stratospheric success -- resentful, even, that Pee-wee got all the credit and Paul Rubenfeld did not -- and when the Florida incident presented the chance to be freed from that Candyland image, Reubens still could not seize the opportunity and live an authentic life.
On hand are insightful talking heads, including Debi Mazar, who was Reubens' companion for a few years after the Florida debacle; co-stars Lynne Marie Stewart, Lawrence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson; director Tim Burton; Groundlings cohorts Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson and Laraine Newman; and sister Abby Rubenfeld. We get a well-rounded portrait of brilliant comedian and an appreciation for how difficult it was, in the end, for both him and his biographer to simply tell his life story. Treasure the many clips, and wish Reubens' soul well.
MY MOM, JAYNE (B) - This is a rather pedantic family history of an actress, Mariska Hargitay (from "Law & Order: SVU"), as she explores the life of her mother, the blond bombshell Jayne Mansfield, who died in 1967 when Mariska was 3. Mariska gathers her brothers and half-sister (who was the oldest and knew their mother best) for weepy and not very insightful reminiscences of the woman who spoke several languages and played the violin, in addition to parading her assets all over the big screen.
Mom Jayne also had some secrets that she took to the grave after the car accident that spared Mariska and her two brothers but not their mother's latest boy toy. Hargitay peels away the mysteries, which were withheld from her as a child and which she then kept from others after she discovered them as an adult. It's a lesson in blowing up stupid family secrets, but it's an awfully ham-handed presentation. (How many times do we have to see middle-aged people break down emotionally on camera while trying to tell a story from 60 years ago?) Apparently the siblings hadn't really reconciled their shared childhood, and they mostly come off as victims of their own denial, rather than insightful observers of the human condition.
The first half of the film does an admirable job of conveying the spectacle that was Jayne Mansfield's career in the 1950s and '60s. It also, grudgingly, digs beneath the glamour to chronicle Mansfield's seemingly casual way of cycling through partners, her kids' interests be damned. The final third wrings a little intrigue from the film's big reveal, but Hargitay drags it out way too long, with several false endings, limping to the 1 hour 45-minute mark. (This easily could have been a 60-minute PBS special.) She does stumble on an endearing punchline -- courtesy of a cheeky step-sibling -- but then it's back to maudlin mode for a couple of corny codas.
BONUS TRACKS
From a key road-trip visual in "Pee-Wee," Brian Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye" from 1974:
And the iconic opening to "Pee-wee's Playhouse," courtesy of artist Gary Panter: