Jack Osbourne’s film “God Bless Ozzy Osbourne” pulls no punches.
‘God Bless Ozzy Osbourne,” a warts-and-all documentary about the pioneering heavy-metal singer turned doddering reality show flameout, presents all sides of the rocker’s life, from his impoverished upbringing in postwar England to the gallons of booze and countless pills he consumed on his way toward dove-biting notoriety.
But while Ozzy’s familiar antics are recounted in salacious detail, most shocking is the candor of his children in relating how awful he’d been as a dad. All five of Ozzy’s now-grown kids — Louis and Jessica from his first marriage, and Aimee, Kelly and Jack from his marriage to manager Sharon Osbourne — have harsh words for his inebriated parenting skills, including Louis mentioning how Ozzy never called for his birthday, Jessica saying she cannot recall her dad ever tucking her into bed at night and Kelly recalling how she’d open the oven to bake with friends only to find her dad’s stash of booze.
“We were all children of an alcoholic family,” says Jack Osbourne, who co-produced the film, out on DVD Tuesday. “Dissatisfaction is not out of the realm of it.”
In one scene, Ozzy is asked by the film’s co-director Mike Piscitelli when Jessica was born, and Ozzy stumbles on the answer, which he ultimately doesn’t know.
Piscitelli says that the film makes it clear that “Ozzy knows there are still open wounds [with his children] that need to be dealt with.” But audience response to that moment also may show how Ozzy has gotten away with such bad behavior for so long, in that he’s become such a cartoon in the eyes of so many that the scene winds up playing for laughs.
“It drives me nuts that it gets a laugh when I ask him when was Jessica born, and he’s like, ‘I don’t know, I can find out for you,’ ” says Piscitelli. “That’s such a heavy scene to me. But I’ve seen the film three times with an audience, and every time that gets a laugh.”
But whatever people’s responses to Ozzy’s vast indiscretions, the motive for making this film was to show that while elements of his past could be seen as disgraceful, Ozzy is now sober more than five years, and, say his kids, has become a very different man, with very different priorities, than the man who was too drunk to care about his children.
“He’s way more involved in our lives in every capacity. He now shows up as a father on a daily basis,” Jack says. “He works a program, he takes it a day at a time like you’re supposed to, he works hard to achieve what he’s got and he’s happy. It’s worked this far. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”