We’ve all heard the old saying, “Only two things in life are certain: death and taxes.” But in this probing, intimate, and politically charged documentary from Justin Schein and Robert Edwards, the two collide with tragicomic precision. Death & Taxes doesn’t just examine America’s estate tax; it begins an uncomfortable dialogue about wealth, legacy, ideology, and the price of chasing immortality through money.
At the core of this film is the complicated relationship between Justin Schein and his father, Harvey Schein, a self-made millionaire whose obsession with the so-called “death tax” drives the narrative forward like a family thriller. What begins as a son’s attempt to understand his father’s worldview becomes a multi-generational reckoning with the American Dream itself.
Death & Taxes isn’t a broad viewpoint picture, though. It’s personal. Harvey isn’t a cardboard cut-out of a capitalist, he’s a charming, complicated. A maddening figure whose desire to shield his fortune from taxation is driven as much by pride and paranoia as it is by principle. Justin is caught between family duty and political dissonance. As the story progresses, he is our reluctant guide through a minefield of inherited trauma, both emotional and financial.
Schein and Edwards make a smart choice in framing the estate tax debate within this familial microcosm, then expanding outward. Talking heads like Grover Norquist and Frank Luntz spout free-market fire, while Robert Reich and Paul Krugman counter with economic justice and moral clarity. Sociologist Matthew Desmond and inequality expert Chuck Collins bring real-world heft, showing that this isn’t just about billionaires and spreadsheets, it’s about how society defines fairness, merit, and responsibility.
A photo of Harvey Schein with his child, marked by a surging graph, visualizes the intersection of family and finance in Death & Taxes.
“…this father clinging to his fortune, and his son searching for meaning…”
With the collage approach, archival footage, home videos, and present-day interviews are stitched together in a manner that adds gravity to the subject. With the drama already infused into the material, this father clinging to his fortune, and his son searching for meaning, all playing out at a time in history that seems to have been experiencing a crumbling of ideology.
Death & Taxes’ strength is its willingness to show contradictions. Harvey Schein, a man who fought to build something from nothing, doesn’t appear to be a villain. He is merely the byproduct of a system that taught him those values. As the story reaches its revelations, we, the viewer, are presented with the most haunting of questions. What are we really leaving behind?
Death & Taxes is about more than inheritance. It’s about the cost of building walls around wealth, even when it means keeping out your own family. If anything can crush humanity to dust, it will be our frantic pursuit of the all-might dollar. Yes, we need money to live, and money might be the world’s go-around. But if that’s all one’s life has been about, those who stand to gain ultimately gain nothing. For all that glistens, it isn’t always gold. As Shakespeare once wrote, “If thou wilt lend this money… lend it rather to thine enemy, who, if he breaks, thou mayst with better face exact the penalty.”
"…it’s about how society defines fairness, merit, and responsibility."
