A Tippling Adventure (2024)
Directed by Benjamin Noah
Written by Noah & Barry Germansky

Adventure / Mystery

★★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

Benjamin Noah’s A Tippling Adventure, co-written with Barry Germansky, tells the tale of Baji (Andrew Ravindran), a Sri Lankan man who’s wound up shipwrecked on the isolated island of Newfoundland in the early 19th century while searching for treasure. Baji makes his way to a tippling house on the coastline. There, he meets Micaela (Rhiannon Morgan), an Irish woman who pours all the drinks and keeps the men in line, as well as a couple of rough lads named Robert (Paul Ewan Wilson) and Ragnall (Lawrence Barry). Soon, a mysterious man, credited as The Drifter (Kevin Hanchard), arrives at the tippling house and complicates things for Baji in a major way. A Tippling Adventure boasts the beauty and ruggedness of Newfoundland while the island’s culture was still in the process of becoming what we know today to be a distinct, unique Newfoundland culture. Through this story, we see the role of immigrants, whether those who came to settle or simply those who stopped by—purposefully or inadvertently—for a period of time, in shaping Newfoundland. Most of all, A Tippling Adventure tells the story of various people from different cultures attempting to change their own personal fortunes, by hook or by crook.

A Tippling Adventure feels like a cross between a classic pirate film and a frontier Western, as men travel the high seas in search of fortune with a backdrop of old rivalries, grudges, and betrayals, not to mention gunplay. Best of all, the story touches on pieces of actual Newfoundland history. A tippling house called The Grey Wolf—where much of the story occurs, shot in the original old room in Mallard Cottage—might as well be right from the history books, as places like St. John’s were full of them between the 1700s and early 1800s; according to records, in the 1830s, there was roughly one tavern/public house/tippling house for every 66 residents. While Newfoundlanders have long battled perceptions of being drunkards, a holdover of already existing anti-Irish sentiment, A Tippling Adventure illustrates how tippling houses and drinking played a significant role in the social makeup of a place like Newfoundland. These houses brought people together; sometimes amicably, sometimes violently, both of which we see in this series, and that’s why a tippling house is the perfect setting for this story, especially since it brings together multiple cultures.

No doubt the racists will balk at not only Baji’s presence in A Tippling Adventure, but also at the mysterious (Black) man’s presence, yet this ignores the realities of Maritime seafaring history. It’s entirely plausible that someone like Baji could’ve ended up stranded in a place such as Newfoundland in the early 19th century considering, among other things, that the Dutch East India Company hired Henry Hudson to find an arctic/northwest passage to Asia and Hudson wound up on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland in 1609. Then there’s the mysterious Drifter, a Jamaican, and the history here should be obvious to anybody who knows even a little about Newfoundland Screech. Newfoundland and Jamaica are forever linked by British Empire trade, as Newfoundland salt fish was frequently exchanged for Caribbean rum, molasses, and sugar; salt fish was a primary ration for enslaved Africans on Jamaican sugar plantations. The Drifter and Baji are fictional characters but their presence and prominence in the series’ narrative is not historical revisionism, unless, of course, your understanding of history is blinded by racism. The only piece of history lacking in A Tippling Adventure is an Indigenous presence. Otherwise, the series realistically depicts Newfoundland’s cultural mixing pot in the early 19th century.

“What brings you here?”
“I will know it when I see it.”

What makes A Tippling Adventure so interesting isn’t just the cinematography or its attention to historical detail, it’s the fact that Noah and co-writer Germansky consistently keep a focus on the reality that Newfoundland’s history is a story all about immigration. Even in the early 1800s, modern Newfoundland culture was only beginning to take real shape, and European settlers remained deeply connected to their own cultures, languages, and traditions. Micaela’s parting words sum up the island’s immigrant history, as she speaks of Baji being a “young man of great persistence, so far from home, like so many others, searching for a new life.” A Tippling Adventure captures the spirit of Newfoundland in its depiction of its characters struggles, resilience, and ingenuity. Ultimately, it’s a story about how the province works best when people from all backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, and religions come together to lift each other up rather than tear each other apart for their differences.