“The Vietnam War” Ken Burns says in a recent interview, “was the most important event in American history since World War II.” But, he explains, it’s also an event that tore the United States apart, a war whose wounds have not yet healed, a war we often try to forget. In the very first interview of this ten-part, eighteen-hour documentary, “The Vietnam War,” author Karl Marlantes describes how “coming home from the war was close to as traumatic as the war itself.” For years, he continues, no one really wanted to talk about what had happened. “It’s like living in a family with an alcoholic father — shh, we don’t talk about that.”

With their new documentary, Ken Burns and Lynn Novick suggest that we not only do need to talk about the war, especially the terrible divisions it left behind, but that together we can begin to overcome them. In addition to recounting the bloody history of the Vietnam War, their documentary seeks to facilitate a kind of collective therapy, where all sides, Americans and Vietnamese, the North and the South, GIs and antiwar activists, can finally begin to work towards closure.

To its credit, the documentary features unseen archival footage, makes an important effort to include Vietnamese voices, and presents an account that is less one-sided than what one would expect from a production sponsored by figures like David H. Koch. But despite its intentions, the overall framing is not only inaccurate, but politically dubious. While some aspects of “The Vietnam War” may challenge the standard pro-American story that is still recycled today, the documentary ultimately reinforces that story, missing an opportunity to raise serious questions about US imperialism. In this way, the closure we get is a superficial one that does not actually bring us closer to ending a war that is in many ways still not over.