Suicide is a lazy script device - discuss

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I would ask your script tutor if he or she has written any Oscar worthy scripts. If they have, you might actually learn something.

Seems a little harsh to call a plot point "lazy".

This film is actually a great character study, and yet gets trivialized just because Heath Ledger kills himself (how prophetic) and Billy Bob Thornton actually gets to play his real self (a stallion).

Careful. Careful. Your university tutor sounds like a pompous ass.

A SELLING script writer, William Goldman, says that, in Hollywood, no one knows anything.

For your tutor to make such a grandiloquent pronouncement places him, I think, in the know-it-all category--a dangerous place, apparently.

What should Sonny have done with his deep, all consuming agony? Written a novel? (Or screenplay?) Sent a note to his dad? Become a serial killer?
Started robbing banks? Stood and made a speech? Run away from home?

Every device but suicide is inadequate here: suicide is stark, irreversible and makes a bold statement about the horror the person wishes to escape from. It is selfish act that accepts no mitigation.

Decent, sensible people recoil from suicide. Those, like Kevorkian, who want to make it acceptable, are reviled by society, except for the few who also want to make suicide a more acceptable alternative.

Even grandpa, one of the worst characters in modern American literature, I think, didn't know how to deal with Sonny's suicide except to say that his grandson was weak.

I think it's generalization to say that suicide is always a lazy way to end a character's arc. This film's script definitely had a lot of contrivances but sometimes that's not the important thing if you are able to let things go and just accept that whatever happens, happens.

Your script tutor is a *beep*

Maybe you should seek the advice of someone who knows something. People do commit suicide. Drama is meant to reflect life. How is writing a drama involving someone who commits suicide lazy?