The documentary about Eamon Ryan's final 18 months as Ireland's minister for environment and transport arrives at a strange cultural moment — when political cinema is almost entirely about corruption, chaos, or charisma in the dark register. Forever Is Now does something genuinely harder: it tries to make a good man interesting. The film follows Ryan through flood-site visits, UN corridors, two COP conferences, and the grinding machinery of coalition government. Director Sinéad O'Shea keeps the camera close, and the access is real — this isn't a soft-focus puff piece shot from a respectful distance but something that catches the actual texture of the work: the travel, the briefings, the torrent of online abuse that Ryan's media adviser Edel Hackett fields with the energy of someone diffusing live ordinance. That Ryan comes across well even accounting for the documentary's obvious sympathies tells you something. He is clearly, constitutionally unable to perform the kind of blunt political theater that earns you clips. He listens to angry flood victims with visible discomfort that isn't performative. His policy record — ambitious climate legislation actually pushed through a coalition government — sits quietly in the background without the film ever making a full case for it. That's a structural choice that frustrates, but the film seems to trust the audience to notice. The film's emotional center is Ryan's son Tommy, who is autistic and requires full-time care. Tommy's repeated phrase — "Forever… forever… forever" — becomes the documentary's title and its emotional counterweight to all the institutional footage. When Ryan names Tommy as one of his reasons for leaving government, the film earns an emotional beat that most political documentaries don't bother reaching for. The allotment scenes, the dog-walking, the glimpsed ordinariness of that relationship: it's the part of the film that will stay with viewers. The gaps are real. There's no interviewer, no adversarial context-setting, no reckoning with the Green Party's near-total wipeout in November 2024's general election — though Ryan's face watching Trump's inauguration while packing up his ministerial office delivers that reckoning non-verbally. An international audience unfamiliar with Irish coalition politics or the specifics of COP will work harder than they should. The film trusts atmosphere to do work that occasionally needs exposition.
