Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

The Belgian co-directors are more interested in preserving a sense of space than in rehearsing arguments about capitalist greed, the commodification of art and gentrification.

The sense of a ghost story is self-evident. Like many examples of the form, the film sticks in the mind longer than you might expect.

The film presents a contemplative elegy for a hotel whose history is being eroded, but by focusing on the literal walls only further removes the voices of the very people who live (and dream) inside of them.

It’s a ghost story haunted by fame and celebrity, but ultimately much more grounded and universal than that.

What it shows us keeps provoking questions (how many people, on average, were tenants at the Chelsea? What was the deal offered to them when the renovations began?) that it’s frustrating not to get answers to.

It’s an exercise in hazy, wistful nostalgia — short on details and revelations, but an easy watch if you like New York stories.

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is a slightly rambling portrait of the very end of an era. An uneven film, it is nonetheless fascinating for the questions it raises and the thoughts it provokes.

Dreaming Walls has its share of poignant moments, but for a documentary about a building, it rarely seems rooted to the ground.

Don’t expect to get the fascinating history of New York City's famous Chelsea Hotel in the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. The movie is a rambling, disjointed look at some of the hotel’s current residents, who are mostly dull.